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More "Drab" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... pelicans pursue a lumbering flight; graceful terns (sea-swallows) skim the waves; a great blue heron stalks across the hard sand, majestic, solitary and shy of man's approach; and dainty little beach-birds, piping plover in snowy white and drab, glide rapidly past the surf-line. A mile below Beach Avenue is a high sandhill shelving abruptly toward the beach, half-buried trees projecting from its western slope: it is now known as "Eagle Cliff," so called by the proprietor of Dungeness from the fact of ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. 26, August, 1880 - of Popular Literature and Science • Various
... both sides of the street invited him—the whole street at this sordid end of it was trying to help him. For a very few shillings he bought just the garments that he had imagined—loose and big made of drab canvas or drill, the suit of overalls that had been worn by some kind of mechanic, with two vast inside pockets to the jacket, in which the wearer had carried tools, food, and his bottle of drink. Dale also bought a ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... about his shoulders, yet buttoned tightly over a stomach that was so incongruous as to seem artificial. The sleeves of the coat were glossy from much desk rubbing, and its front advertised a rather inattentive behavior at table. The Colonel's dress was completed by drab overgaiters and poorly draped trousers of the same once-delicate hue. Upon his bald head, which was high and peaked, like Sir Walter Scott's, he carried a silk hat in an inferior state of preservation. When he began to drink it was his custom to repair at once to a barber ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... was to be had, every body in Bodmin immediately asked him to dinner. Mr Tremayne declined the majority of the invitations; but he accepted that from Bradmond, which included his family also. So he, in a brown velvet suit, and Custance in the gravest drab, and Arbel with some bright blue ribbons neutralising her sober "sad-coloured" dress, and Robin, whose cap bore a white feather stuck in it in a style not suggestive of Quakerism, walked up to Bradmond one Thursday afternoon, ...
— Robin Tremain - A Story of the Marian Persecution • Emily Sarah Holt
... New Gallery. We shall pass out of sight of flat dreary London, drab-coloured streets full of overcoats, silk hats, dripping umbrellas, omnibuses. We shall pass out of sight of long perspectives of square houses lost in fine rain and grey mist. We shall enter an enchanted ...
— Modern Painting • George Moore
... induce her to put on the brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... of garments and moving from one show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking as ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... without much delay, a train-load wholly of men, and all greenhorns. For all of us had nice fresh crinkly blouses, and olive-drab (properly o. d.) knees not yet worn white (as I have seen on returning Plattsburgers) while our canvas leggings were still unshaped to our manly calves. Our hats were new and stiff, and their gaudy ...
— At Plattsburg • Allen French
... practised, in the overwhelming main, in remote and God-forsaken regions, in which the only rival entertainment is offered by one-sided political campaigns, third-rate chautauquas and Methodist revivals. When it is imitated in the North, it is always in some drab factory or mining town. Genuine race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, but these are always economic in origin, and have nothing to do with lynching, properly so-called. One could not imagine an actual lynching at, say, Atlantic City, with ten or fifteen bands playing, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... unable to do any coherent thinking. His head ached, his lips burned with fever, and his body kept him busy with the sensation of pain. It seemed to him that illness made his state more detestable, but it also offered him a chance of escape from the whole drab business. He was quite sure that he wanted to escape, and he would not have believed it if any one had told him that he would resist death to the uttermost; yet deep within him was that will to live which had made ...
— Claire - The Blind Love of a Blind Hero, By a Blind Author • Leslie Burton Blades
... a bleak picture; the plains dead and drear, barren of verdure—a dull, drab expanse of waste world with no life or movement in it, stretching ...
— The Trail Horde • Charles Alden Seltzer
... am only desperately honest in wishing that my salvation and future felicity could be secured beyond all peradventure, by a sacrifice of oatcakes, or white doves, or black cats, instead of a drab-colored life of prayer, penance, purity, and patience. I don't deny that I would rather spend my days in watching the gorgeous pageant of the Panathenaea, or chanting dithyrambics to insure a fine vintage, or even offering a Taigheirm, than in running neck and ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... wonder that we all was still— For one of us was thinkin' of a hill, With pine trees on it black against th' moon— And one of us was dreaming of a town, All drab an' brown— An' one of us was lookin'—far an' high Ter some one who had gone back home too soon To that real home ...
— Cross Roads • Margaret E. Sangster
... the office to inquire for a steamer for New Orleans, and on leaving was accosted by a young man with the query whether I was looking for a boat. As he saw that I noticed the feather in his drab hat, and star, with stripes on the sleeves of his gray coat, he remarked that he was an exchanged prisoner, and was on his way to his home ...
— A Woman's Life-Work - Labors and Experiences • Laura S. Haviland
... knapsack a' in order; His doxy lay within his arm; Wi' usquebae an' blankets warm She blinkit on her sodger; An' aye he gies the tozie drab The tither skelpin' kiss, While she held up her greedy gab, Just like an aumous dish; Ilk smack still, did crack still, Just like a cadger's whip; Then staggering an' swaggering He roar'd this ...
— Poems And Songs Of Robert Burns • Robert Burns
... a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion was pale and sodden, and his hair short, dark, and sleek. The ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... stripes were given to soldiers on becoming casualties to Cupid's archery barrage, Ronnie Morgan's sleeve would be stiff with gilt embroidery. The spring offensive claimed him as an early victim. When be became an extensive purchaser of drab segments of fossilized soap, bottles of sticky brilliantine with a chemical odour, and postcards worked with polychromatic silk, the billet began ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 28, 1919. • Various
... trees and its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a little wooden pier, sadly in want of ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... gulch, was all but without motion. The icy breeze tore tiny puffs of dust from grotesque, angling drifts of soil, nearly waterless for eons. Patches of drab lichen grew here and there on the up-jutting rocks, but in the desert itself, no other life was visible. Even the hills had sagged away, flattened by ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... seemed to be shut in by a wall of blackness on every hand, except ahead where, like great streaming eyes of fire, the powerful lamps shot out their rays making weird color effects in the forest—huge tree-trunks loomed a dead drab, like mute sentinels, grim and ominous, that barred their way; now, in the full glare, the foliage took on the softest fairy shade of green; now, tapering off, heavier in color, it merged into impenetrable black; and, with the jouncing of the car, ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... The houses were drab and ugly, with untidy grass-plots in front. They presented an exterior of three windows and a narrow round-topped hall-door which was a confession of poverty in itself. Five out of six houses had a ramping plaster horse in the fanlight ...
— Mary Gray • Katharine Tynan
... General. The boy told the stranger, who proved to be Colonel Meade, once of Washington's staff, that the General was abroad on the estate and pointed out what direction to take to come upon him. "You will meet, sir, with an old gentleman riding alone in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand, and carrying an umbrella with a long staff, which is attached to his saddle-bow—that ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... two first, and when he had gleaned from the old volume all it had to teach him, he longed for a master. Him he found in the person of an old French emigre priest, {21b} a study in snuff-colour and drab with a frill of dubious whiteness, who attended to the accents of a number of boarding-school young ladies. The progress of his pupil so much pleased the old priest that "after six months' tuition, ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... weather-beaten man in a weather-worn drab coat, entertained me with tales of the clearances made in the famine time that left the country side so empty. It is hard to believe that ever human beings were so cruel to other human beings in this Christian land, and that it passed unknown, or comparatively unknown, ...
— The Letters of "Norah" on her Tour Through Ireland • Margaret Dixon McDougall
... same scenes of beauty, and would fain barter the Cork Woods for the chestnuts in Bushy Park; the bright Bay and the watchet sky pall on the senses, and a dull river and drab clouds would be welcomed for change. The day rises when the conversation of the same set, the stories repeated as often as that famous one of grouse in the gun-room, and the stale jokes anent the Sheeref of Wazan and ...
— Romantic Spain - A Record of Personal Experiences (Vol. II) • John Augustus O'Shea
... A drab-coloured woman of middle age entered. She was one of the individuals so grateful for being noticed at all that her cheerfulness was a constant reproach. She had been selected by Kathryn's father to act as housekeeper and chaperon. As the former she was a gratifying ...
— At the Crossroads • Harriet T. Comstock
... another tugging at her skirts. Her faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the rounded arms—her sleeves were rolled to the ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... but smooth or burnished surface, self- coloured (drab or brown), or intentionally coloured black (by charred matter in the clay, or by a smoky fire), or red (by a clear fire, sometimes aided by a wash or 'slip' of more ferruginous clay). Sometimes a black ware is ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... hour of their journeying drew to an end, a sudden vision of green, like an emerald dropped on the drab face of the plain, brought a flush to Honor's cheeks, a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... disfigured the countenance of the other; nor, though roguish enough, a certain evil expression which that of the other bore, and which the face of the woman possessed in a yet more remarkable degree. For the rest, he wore drab breeches, with certain strings at the knee, a rather gay waistcoat, and tolerably white shirt; under his arm he bore a mighty whip of whalebone with a brass knob, and upon his head was a hat ...
— Lavengro - The Scholar, The Gypsy, The Priest • George Borrow
... Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes to each knee; and it was de rigueur ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... only absently, his eyes going back to the bold, beautiful face. For twenty years he had been accustomed to the women of Vogar; colorless in their Party uniforms and men's haircuts, made even more drab by the masculine mannerisms they affected. Not since the spring the Lost Islands died had he seen a girl like the ...
— The Helpful Hand of God • Tom Godwin
... Sons published page for page reprints of Targum and The Talisman. They were issued together in one volume, bound in light drab-coloured paper boards, with white paper back-label, and were accompanied by ...
— A Bibliography of the writings in Prose and Verse of George Henry Borrow • Thomas J. Wise
... happened to come in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha dearly loved a scene, for to be admitted to a scene was to be admitted ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... gentleman of L300 per annum who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance of the county town, and that only at assize or session time, or to attend an election. Once a week he commonly dined ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... that. She was a woman of some sixty years, with a stern handsome face under harsh bands of yellowish gray hair, and a mouth that sank in at one corner where her upper teeth had been drawn. Her figure was erect and flat as a lath, and this flatness was accentuated by the extreme scantiness of her drab calico dress. In her youth she had been beautiful in a hard, obvious fashion, and her eyes would have been still fine except for their ...
— The Miller Of Old Church • Ellen Glasgow
... old days when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... vehicle was not a humble conveyance like the first, but a spick-and-span gig or dog-cart, highly varnished and equipped. The driver was a young man of three- or four-and-twenty, with a cigar between his teeth; wearing a dandy cap, drab jacket, breeches of the same hue, white neckcloth, stick-up collar, and brown driving-gloves—in short, he was the handsome, horsey young buck who had visited Joan a week or two before to ...
— Tess of the d'Urbervilles - A Pure Woman • Thomas Hardy
... seen some of these people passing up and down the river, when employed on a steamer between Natchez and New Orleans, and had heard that they disliked slavery. He, therefore, hastened toward the drab-coated men, who, on his approach, opened the barn-door, and told him to ...
— Clotelle - The Colored Heroine • William Wells Brown
... Ichabod stood in the narrow window frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,—a condensed milky way. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... fourth time, after pushing back our chairs from breakfast we saw the greasy, heavy brown swirl still drifting past us and condensing in oily drops upon the window-panes, my comrade's impatient and active nature could endure this drab existence no longer. He paced restlessly about our sitting-room in a fever of suppressed energy, biting his nails, tapping the furniture, ...
— The Adventure of the Bruce-Partington Plans • Arthur Conan Doyle
... the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs! The syren warns the shore, The flowing tide sings ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... pointing to the captain, says, 'My husband, though he is become a blackguard jail-bird, must be allowed to be a handsome fellow still.'—On the other hand, he will frequently desire me to take notice of his rib, as she chances to pass.—'Mind that draggle-tailed drunken drab,' he will say; 'what an antidote it is—yet, for all that, Felton, she was a fine woman when I married her—Poor Bess, I have been the ruin of her, that is certain, and deserve to be d—ned for bringing her to ...
— The Adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves • Tobias Smollett
... in sight. It used to be painted white; it was drab now, and there was a bay-window in the sitting-room. There was a new pump in the old place, and, happy omen, he discovered it was one of his own manufacture. He made his way by sheer force of habit past the kitchen windows to the side door. That was where they ...
— Ladies-In-Waiting • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... people appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... Romany chals Who besh in the pus about the yag, I'll pen how we drab the baulo, I'll pen ...
— The Romany Rye - A Sequel to 'Lavengro' • George Borrow
... the world are the spontaneous. We lead such drab lives ourselves and keep back so much, we like to see a little Niagara of human emotion occasionally. The Thoracic feels everything keenly. Life's experiences make vivid records on the sensitive plate of his mind. He puts them on the Victrola that is himself ...
— How to Analyze People on Sight - Through the Science of Human Analysis: The Five Human Types • Elsie Lincoln Benedict and Ralph Paine Benedict
... course, employed additional help, but the harvesters were for the most part residents of the neighborhood, who found accommodation in their own homes. The house was a small frame, oblong building, of the conventional Canadian farm-house order of architecture, painted of a drab color and standing a hundred yards or so from the main road. The barn and stable stood a convenient distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and chain. During the preceding ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... I will become a physician again, with some drab old housekeeper to neglect me and the house. Do you foresee the cobwebs gathering and gathering, ...
— Quality Street - A Comedy • J. M. Barrie
... at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so! Yet I've done very well this year. O yes," he went on with ingenuous enthusiasm. "You see that man with the drab kerseymere coat? I bought largely of him in the autumn when wheat was down, and then afterwards when it rose a little I sold off all I had! It brought only a small profit to me; while the farmers kept theirs, expecting ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... your case, though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... he was of being noticed by the ministers he affected to treat arrogantly. His panic, at the Mohocks is comical; but what strikes one, is bringing before one's eyes the incidents of a curious period. He goes to the rehearsal of Cato, and says the drab that acted Cato's daughter could not say her part. This was only Mrs. Oldfield. I was saying before George Selwyn, that this journal put me in mind of the present time, there was the same indecision, irresolution, and want of system; but I added, "There ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole Volume 3 • Horace Walpole
... malignant scarlet fever begins with inflamed tonsils; which are succeeded by dark drab coloured sloughs three or five lines in diameter, flat, or beneath the surrounding surface; and which conceal beneath them spreading gangrenous ulcers. The swellings of the tonsils are sensible to the eye and touch externally, and have an elastic rather than an oedematous feel, ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... leaving behind everything that impeded their progress. The region was almost impenetrable in its wildness except by those who knew all its rugged paths. The body of the man whom June had wounded, however, was found, clothed in a suit of Quaker drab stolen from Mr. Reynolds. The rest of the band with few exceptions met with fates that accorded ...
— Taken Alive • E. P. Roe
... end, stopping tears and sobs as best she might, she waited listlessly her sentence of expulsion. Now nothing mattered; if her heart was lighter, her future was darker; and presently the nobody that she was would return into that drab nowhere whence some ill wind ...
— Nobody • Louis Joseph Vance
... with a list, carefully checks off all our names, and retires to the booking office, from which a minute later he returns. He is this time accompanied by the coachman, who is a handsome, roguish-looking man. He wears a white hat, his boots are brilliantly polished, his drab great-coat is faultlessly clean, and the dark blue neckerchief is daintily tied. His whiskers are carefully brushed forward and curled, the flower in the button-hole is as fresh as if that instant plucked, and he has a look as ...
— Personal Recollections of Birmingham and Birmingham Men • E. Edwards
... the 'point proposed' with only a loss equivalent to the proverbial 'year's growth,' had not a hidden snag unluckily lain in the way, which 'by hook or by crook' fastened itself in the part of my trowsers exactly corresponding, when dry, with that 'broad disk of drab' finally seen, after much anxiety, by the curious Geoffrey Crayon between the parted coat-skirts of a certain mysterious 'Stout Gentleman,' and inextricably held me in check despite ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... no creed. I knew of no ideals. The only thing I believed in was the cold, drab theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This could not satisfy a heart that was hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... drew near to Los Angeles. And then they were there, sliding slowly through the yards in a drab drizzle of one of California's fall rains. Then they were in a taxicab, making for the Third Street tunnel. Then Jean stared heavy-eyed at the dripping palms along the boulevard which led away from the smoke of the city ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... this was that young sister of his, whose name was Oalava, a maid of about sixteen, shy and silent and mild-eyed, rather lean and dirty; not ugly, nor yet prepossessing. And this copper-coloured little drab of the wilderness he proposed to bestow in marriage on me! Anxious to pump him, I managed to control my muscles and asked him what authority he—a young nobody, who had not yet risen to the dignity of buying a wife ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... him, whose broad gray piers painted perpetual arches on the sluggish, sea-colored water. The smoke from one or two far-off foundries hung just above it, motionless in the gray, in tattered drifts, dyed by the sun, clear drab and violet. A still picture. A bit of Venice, poor Adam thought, who never had been fifty miles out of Wheeling. The quaint American town was his world: he brought the world into it. There were relics of old Indian forts and mounds, the old times ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... but he certainly did not return to the outward simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more round- hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat, and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of the American lower class manner; the ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... paused, Oliver's attention, which had wandered off into a vague mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of his uncle's marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed strangled in that smell as if in some malarial air. And in the midst of it, the unkempt, slack ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... I. "But the circumstances in which he visited it were somewhat drab. Still, it's not an attractive town, and, as the other way's shorter and the road's about ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... to which Rathbury led the way was cold, drab, repellent to the general gay sense of the summer morning. Spargo shivered involuntarily as he entered it and took a first glance around. But the young barrister showed no sign of feeling or concern; he looked ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... not the slayer, he is the braver man. So far my text—but the story? Thus, then, it runs; from Spokane Rolled out the overland mail train, late by an hour. In the cab David Shaw, at your service, dressed in his blouse of drab. Grimed by the smoke and the cinders. "Feed her well, Jim," he said; (Jim was his fireman.) "Make up time!" On and ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... However, she could not resist going through the porch as far as the concierge's room on the right. And there, on the threshold, she raised her eyes. Inside, the building was six stories high, with four identical plain walls enclosing the broad central court. The drab walls were corroded by yellowish spots and streaked by drippings from the roof gutters. The walls went straight up to the eaves with no molding or ornament except the angles on the drain pipes at each floor. Here the sink ...
— L'Assommoir • Emile Zola
... Joyce would call a drab blonde—washed out complexion and sallow hair. She looks drab all the way through to me, but she may be the kind that improves on acquaintance. She certainly has a good figure, and looks as stylish as one of ...
— The Little Colonel's Chum: Mary Ware • Annie Fellows Johnston
... and serious manner. It was song and dance for Cynthia, and the little doctor looking on, charmed by the turn their dull life had taken, saw no danger. To her Cynthia was a child still, and she was grateful that she should have this bit of brightness and joy in her narrow, drab-coloured life. ...
— A Son of the Hills • Harriet T. Comstock
... enjoined. When he was angry with his female disciples, he frequently whipped them; but, being a monstrous coward, he never tried it on a man. The least opposition or contradiction threw him into a great rage, and set him screaming, and cursing, and gesticulating like any street drab. When he wished more clothes, which was pretty often, one of his dupes furnished the money. When he wanted cash for any purpose indeed, they ...
— The Humbugs of the World • P. T. Barnum
... spoken of was a gentleman with a very unpromising squint, and a prominent chin, who had a tall white hat on with a narrow flat brim, and whose close-fitting drab trousers seemed to button all the way up outside his legs from his boots to his hips. His chin was cocked over the coachman's shoulder, so near to me, that his breath quite tickled the back of my head; and as I looked at him, ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... likened to a butterfly, with its wings closed, and only the more or less drab outside showing. The veldt, somewhat uniform and colourless, with its surrounding hills, is the butterfly with its wings closed. Enter the wide hole in the ground, beside the hidden lake, and descend ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... there were indications that the owner was fond of gardening; here a few sweet peas curled lovingly up the sticks put in for them—there some tulips showed signs of nightly attention. But in most the plot was plain and drab as the house—a dead thing; a thing without a soul. Individuality, laughter—aye, life itself—seemed crushed in that endless road, with its interminable ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... Lee couldn't pretend to answer all this for women, or even in part for Savina. Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... sleepy and squalid it seemed! The one main street ended at the hillside at his left and stretched away to the north, between two rows of the usual village stores, unrelieved by a tree or a touch of beauty. An unpaved street, drab-colored, miserable, rotting wooden buildings, with the inevitable battlements-the same, ...
— Main-Travelled Roads • Hamlin Garland
... its drab—very drab!—quarters and its mean—very mean!—and straggling streets. Madras was not laid out on any definite plan. Like ancient Rome, it had in the beginning to attract outsiders to come and live there, and outsiders had to be given much license to do things their own way, and ...
— The Story of Madras • Glyn Barlow
... a Thracian chieftain or to assess some poor devil's damages in drachmae! Let us honour, not pity or despise them, for having thought it right to do so, for having deliberately determined to infuse into public affairs, in themselves so drab and dull, so deficient in the fineness and subtlety which characterize men's more intimate concerns, the interest derived from the very fact that honest, sincere, and able minds devoted themselves to their study. As Huxley could make the geological procession of the ages revolve round a piece ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... embarrassment—no bed; nothing to offer the invalid in the shape of food save a piece of thin, tough, flexible, drab-coloured cloth, made of flour and mill-stones in equal proportions, and called by the name of “bread”; then the patient, of course, had no “confidence in his medical man,” and on the whole, the best chance of saving my comrade ...
— Eothen • A. W. Kinglake
... country which have no hair on their tail. this Specis we found on the Missouri as far up it as the woody country extended. it is as large as the Common European house rat or reather larger is of a lighter Colour bordering more on the lead or drab colour, the hair longer; and the female has only four tits which are placed far back near the hinder legs. this rat I have Seen in the Southern parts of the State of Kentucky & ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... that he had made himself look as much a traveller as Livingstone or Burton. Some strange dreams in the matter of dress had possessed the mind of Mrs. Cockayne, and her daughters also. They were in varieties of drab coloured dresses and cloaks; and the mother and the three daughters, deeming bonnets, we suppose, to be eccentric head-gears in Paris, wore dark brown hats all of one pattern, all ornamented with voluminous blue veils, ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... I don't want to wait that long. Now, for instance, who lives over there on my left; the square white house with the drab blinds?" ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Paymaster snuff above his tepid second day's broth, and hear the Cornal snort because the mince-collops his toothless-ness demanded on other days of the week were not available to-day, would be, somehow, to bring a sordid, unable, drab and weary world close up on a vision of joy and beauty. He felt it in his flesh, in some flutter of the breast It was better to be out here in the sun among the chattering people, to have nothing between him and Glen Shira but a straight sweep of wind-blown highway. From the steps of the church ...
— Gilian The Dreamer - His Fancy, His Love and Adventure • Neil Munro
... pass the hemlock, when it's on fire. I'll go with you till you get beyond that," said uncle Nathan, taking his drab overcoat from a nail behind ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... a drab, middle-aged type of revery, and youth might show more life and color; but the linkages between one thought and the next are typical of any revery. The linkages belong in the category of "facts previously observed". I had previously ...
— Psychology - A Study Of Mental Life • Robert S. Woodworth
... delay, Mr. Mortimor led Pauline down the aisle. Dr. Hartwell and Mrs. Lockhart stood near the altar. Mr. Lockhart's indisposition prevented his attendance. Satin, blond, and diamonds were discarded; Pauline was dressed in a gray traveling habit and wore a plain drab traveling bonnet. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... reaching down even to the hem of the garment, which is invariably a double-breasted one, made upon the good old dining-out principle of leaving plenty of room in the victualling department. To complete the catalogue of raiment, the untalkaboutables have so little right to the name of drab, that it would cause a controversy on the point. Perhaps nothing in life can more exquisitely illustrate the Desdemona feeling of divided duty, than the portion of manufactured calf-skin appropriated to the peripatetic ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 1, Complete • Various
... who hanker for a touch of colour, So to relieve their sombre air; For me, I like my clothes to be much duller Than what the nigger minstrels wear; I hold by sable, drab and grey; I do not wish ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... saint and mystic have ever dreamed of it as union with their deity. For it is possible and open to all, to every heart, that is, not blinded by the cloaking horror of materialism which blocks the doorways of escape and prisons self behind the drab illusion that the outer form is the reality ...
— The Centaur • Algernon Blackwood
... he lay so quiet that Sally believed him to be asleep. But at her first movement he would unclose his eyes and groan her name, groping with his finger to detain her. So she sat in his big square bedroom with the drab walls and the plain furniture, watching the daylight fade and pondering to herself. It was a gloom period, and it had a perceptible effect upon her vitality. At other times Gaga would rally, would even sit up and talk in his old stammer, his grey face ...
— Coquette • Frank Swinnerton
... grey and hollow-sounding in the chilly silences, his own footsteps echoed solemnly as he passed by the door of the great ragged church. Through the heavy darkness within lights flickered faintly and went; service was not begun. A drab crew of cripples lounged on the steps yawning and shivering, and two country girls were strolling to mass with brown arms round each other's waists. When Sandro's footfall clattered on the stones they stopped by the door looking after him and laughed to see his dull face and muffled figure. In ...
— Earthwork Out Of Tuscany • Maurice Hewlett
... sentimental observer, had he been present, might have imagined that the old town was glad to have once again an excuse for some display, and preened itself and showed forth its richest and warmest colours and wondered, perhaps, whether after all the drab and interesting citizens of to-day were not minded to return to the gayer and happier old times. Quite a noise, too, of chatter and trumpets and bells and laughter. Even the Archdeacon forgot his official smile and ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... And the Romany chal Shall jaw tasaulor To drab the bawlor, And dook the gry Of the ...
— The Worlds Greatest Books - Vol. II: Fiction • Arthur Mee, J. A. Hammerton, Eds.
... the notice of more than one of her cavalier cousins, notably of pretty little Looloo, who had kissed the visitor shyly (for a Cooney) at greeting, and said, "Oh, Cally! You do look so lovely!" Cally herself was aware of an inner buoyance oddly at variance with the drab Cooney milieu. Recent progress in the great game had more than blotted out all memory of little ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... at this point, emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... thrilling thing. For here were his people. Here were the men and women who were guarding the northern door of the world, an epic place, filled with strong hearts, courage, and a love of country as inextinguishable as one's love of life. From this drab little place, shut out from all the world for half the year, young men and women went down to southern universities, to big cities, to the glamor and lure of "outside." But they always came back. Nome called them. Its loneliness in winter. Its gray ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... Gentlemanhood is an extinct folly; and Ambition is madness; and desire of distinction is criminal vanity; and glory is bosh; and fair fame is idleness; and nothing is true but two and two; and the color of all the world is drab; and all men are equal; and one man is as tall as another; and one man is as good as another—and a great dale betther, as the ...
— Roundabout Papers • William Makepeace Thackeray
... mantelpiece, and stood on brackets here and there about the room. There were also some exquisite and wonderfully carved oak, a Queen Anne sofa, and several spindle-legged chairs. An old spinet stood in a distant window, and the drab moreen curtains ...
— Light O' The Morning • L. T. Meade
... fire-place was seated a man of a grave aspect, who wore a pretty large wig, which had once been white, but was now of a brownish yellow; his coat was a modest coloured drab; and two jack-boots concealed in part the well-mended knees of an old pair of buckskin breeches. Next him sat another man, with a tankard in his hand and a quid of tobacco in his cheek, whose dress was ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VI. • Various
... with us under a sky that would make of Job an optimist. All around are light and color, the evidences of life and hope. Here the whites are white, and not a dirty drab. The streets glisten clean in the sunlight, and every window is a reflector of glad promise. In London, choked with fog, and grimy with soot-dust, the Englishman cannot see the future for smoke, cannot extract a gleam of hope from the sodden, mud-soaked thoroughfares. To be sanguine here on ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... maze of narrow, winding streets, we came to Poplar Workhouse. On a low stone wall we spread our handkerchiefs, and each in his handkerchief put all his worldly possessions, with the exception of the "bit o' baccy" down his sock. And then, as the last light was fading from the drab-coloured sky, the wind blowing cheerless and cold, we stood, with our pitiful little bundles in our hands, a forlorn group ...
— The People of the Abyss • Jack London
... above is so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought spent ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... age limit for the army, but I am sorry to say I have marched a good many years even beyond that. It is a great opportunity, an opportunity that only comes once in many centuries to the children of men. For most generations sacrifice comes in drab and weariness of spirit. It comes to you today, and it comes today to us all, in the form of the glow and thrill of a great movement for liberty, that impels millions throughout Europe to the same noble end. [Applause.] It is a great war for the emancipation of Europe from the ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War from the Beginning to March 1915, Vol 1, No. 2 - Who Began the War, and Why? • Various
... these to produce children for us to keep."—"Beauties, indeed! your ladyship is pleased to be merry," answered Scout.—"Mr Adams described her so to me," said the lady. "Pray, what sort of dowdy is it, Mr Scout?"—"The ugliest creature almost I ever beheld; a poor dirty drab, your ladyship never saw such a wretch."—"Well, but, dear Mr Scout, let her be what she will, these ugly women will bring children, you know; so that we must prevent the marriage."—"True, madam," ...
— Joseph Andrews, Vol. 2 • Henry Fielding
... the loafers, the habitual drunkards and the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to recommend it ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... in the country nurse The poor that else were undone; Some landlords spend their money worse, On lust and pride at London. There the roys'ters they do play, Drab and dice their lands away, Which may be ours another day; And ...
— Christmas: Its Origin and Associations - Together with Its Historical Events and Festive Celebrations During Nineteen Centuries • William Francis Dawson
... yourself bankrupt at once, for this liability is a ton weight at least. When I came in I found your fire out, and I had it lit again, and made that sulky drab of a servant stay and blow at it with the bellows till it had burnt up properly; now, ...
— The Professor • (AKA Charlotte Bronte) Currer Bell
... bury my black beard and chin deep down in this drab neck-cloth, and pull the broad brim low over my black hair and eyes, I look as mild ...
— Hidden Hand • Emma Dorothy Eliza Nevitte Southworth
... the police officers' overcoat of the day, several pairs of blue trousers, with the broad stripe of the cavalry, and these as they came were flung on the bed by Barker and "Shoe." Then appeared a suit of evening clothes, carefully handled. Then a brown business suit of tweeds, then a light drab overcoat, and then the closet was well nigh empty, and Lanier faced them with ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... edge of the populous parish of Paddington, in a parallelogram bounded by Oxford and Cambridge Terrace on the south, Praed Street on the north, and by Edgware Road on the east and Spring Street on the west, lies an assemblage of mean streets, the drab dulness of which forms a remarkable contrast to the pretentious architectural grandeurs of Sussex Square and Lancaster Gate, close by. In these streets the observant will always find all those evidences of depressing semi-poverty which are more evident in London than in ...
— The Orange-Yellow Diamond • J. S. Fletcher
... For there stood the funniest old woman that Cely or Miss Melville had ever seen. She had on a black dress, very long and very scant, that looked as if it were made out of an old waterproof cloak. Over that, she wore a curious drab-silk sack, somewhat faded and patched, with all the edges of the seams outside. Over that, was a plaid red-and-green shawl, tied about her waist. There was a little black shawl over that, and a green ...
— Gypsy Breynton • Elizabeth Stuart Phelps
... many other towns remains to assure us that the red-tiled houses, the overhanging storeys, the high gables and quaint dormer windows, presented a {689} far more pleasing appearance than do our lines of smoky factories and drab dwellings. ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... were rich with embroideries. "People," said William Morris, "have long since ceased to take in impressions through their eyes," indeed so insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him and he ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... was of three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... insists that I am the dramatist in real life," said he. "Some touch of the artist wells up within me, and calls insistently for a well-staged performance. Surely our profession, Mr. Mac, would be a drab and sordid one if we did not sometimes set the scene so as to glorify our results. The blunt accusation, the brutal tap upon the shoulder—what can one make of such a denouement? But the quick inference, the subtle trap, the clever ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... was serene. As he had made up his mind to be a dramatist merely because the career appealed acutely to his itching ambition, so did he in due course make up his mind to marry this handsome brunette (what hair he had was drab) who bore all the earmarks of secret wealth in spite of the fact that she lived in a small hotel. As time went on, Gisela resigned herself and put his little ...
— The White Morning • Gertrude Atherton
... of the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we might complain that he sometimes—rarely—writes, not by vocation of the ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence of his special ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... Congregationalists, and was formerly known as Connaught Chapel. Just beyond the chapel we come to the St. Marylebone Almshouses. They are built round three sides of a square, and enclose a quadrangle of green grass. The blue slate roofs and drab stuccoed walls form a gentle contrast. The central house, occupied by the superintendent, is fronted by a clock over ...
— Hampstead and Marylebone - The Fascination of London • Geraldine Edith Mitton
... that in sibyls he had a preference. If she was to send him to the devil, she must be of the type which he qualified as a "drab." Without knowing the dictionary meaning of the word, he felt that it implied whatever would contrast most revoltingly with Barbara Walbrook. Seeing with her own eyes to what she had driven him, her heart would be wrung. That ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... exercised. They looked offensively modern, and I wondered why our Army had not got field artillery with fixed ammunition and 8,000 yards range. Some officers and men of the Staats Artillerie, dressed in a drab uniform with blue facings, approached us. The commander, Adjutant Roos—as he introduced himself—made a polite salute. He regretted the unfortunate circumstances of our meeting; he complimented the officers on their defence—of course, it was hopeless from the first; he trusted his fire had ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... walk down into the cabin"; and shortly down comes old Captain Percival, a white-haired, thin-visaged, weather-worn old gentleman, in a blue Quaker-cut coat, with tarnished lace and brass buttons, a pair of drab pantaloons, and brown waistcoat. There was an eccentric expression in his face, which seemed partly wilful, partly natural. He has not risen to his present rank in the regular line of the profession; but entered ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various
... nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the lower part of ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... stands the sullen drab figure of a girl who tries to show how loyal she is to the vagabond in the hands of the law. It all began with a misguided idea of liberty. The youth is the one who told his father he had had all the education he needed and promptly became a street ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)
... twenty inches in length, eight or ten inches in diameter, and weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds and upwards; skin thin, easily pierced or broken, of an ash-gray color, spotted, and marked with light drab and nankeen-brown,—the furrows dividing the ribs light drab; stem small; flesh deep orange-yellow, of medium thickness; seeds pure white, broader in proportion to their length than those of the ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... for sports was held in the afternoon before the sale, and was voted by all to be a great success. It is a far cry from the days when games were introduced here by the Mission. Then the people's lives were so drab, and they had little idea of the sporting qualities which every Englishman values so highly. In those early days if in a game of football one side kicked a goal, they had to wait till the other had done the same before the game could proceed, or the play would ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... which was as high as your head above the ground, was composed of myriads of glow-worms all holding on to each other, and so forming a dazzling canopy over the fairy ring. There were thousands of little people looking on, but they were in shadow and drab in colour compared to the glorious creatures within that luminous circle, who were so bewilderingly bright that Maimie had to wink hard all the time she ...
— Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens • J. M. Barrie
... had come down from the woods and entered upon her duties in the mill office. The change from her dull, drab life, giving her, as it did, an opportunity for companionship with people of greater mentality and refinement than she had been used to, quickly brought about a swift transition in the girl's nature. With the passing ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... got to see that we are all white men. The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the North-East Teuton anything that marks him out especially from the more colourless classes of the rest of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the grey or the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents, that the difference between him and us is a difference between "the master-race and the inferior-race." The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the beginning rather than the end of an argument; and the difficulty ...
— The Appetite of Tyranny - Including Letters to an Old Garibaldian • G.K. Chesterton
... computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab 'uniform' paint used for ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... it won her instant fame and a small fortune. It was gloomy, pessimistic, excoriating, merciless, drab, sordid, and hideously realistic. Its people hailed from that plebeian end of the vegetable garden devoted to turnips and cabbages. They possessed all the mean vices and weaknesses that detestable humanity has so far begotten. They were all failures ...
— Black Oxen • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... told her, when there came to him for the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful country on ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... kinds and conditions of men were these passers-by. Earthling sailors, white, negro, Chinese and Eurasian, most of them in the drab blue of space-ship crews, but each with a ray-gun strapped to his waist; short, thin-faced Venusians, shifty-eyed, cunning, with the planet's universal weapon, the skewer-blade, sheathed at their sides; tall, sweaty ...
— The Affair of the Brains • Anthony Gilmore
... insidiousness Creeps into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard fingers ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... the "correct thing" for foreign parts, and that he had made himself look as much a traveller as Livingstone or Burton. Some strange dreams in the matter of dress had possessed the mind of Mrs. Cockayne, and her daughters also. They were in varieties of drab coloured dresses and cloaks; and the mother and the three daughters, deeming bonnets, we suppose, to be eccentric head-gears in Paris, wore dark brown hats all of one pattern, all ornamented with voluminous ...
— The Cockaynes in Paris - 'Gone abroad' • Blanchard Jerrold
... Ange was monotonous. There was a shading of individuality in the girls and newly-wed women, but it faded soon into the dull drab that seemed the only possible wearing-colour of the place. Occasionally, though, the sameness had been relieved by a vivid touch, but only for a short hour. The Fate who snips the threads, had invariably ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... in the little kitchen leaning her elbows on the table. She was a tall, thin, sallow girl, aged twenty-three, by nature slatternly and careless but trained by Anna into superficial neatness. Her drab striped cotton dress and gray black checked apron increased the length and sadness of her melancholy figure. "Oh, Lord!" groaned Miss Mathilda to ...
— Three Lives - Stories of The Good Anna, Melanctha and The Gentle Lena • Gertrude Stein
... nervous stride. A dozen times he looked at his watch—would he be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he was in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... you not to be the first to bound with indignation? Ought you not to have exacted my admittance to the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to be driven away from all ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... of buttons to close them around the ankles when occasion required. There was no vest. Its place was supplied by ample frills of cambric lace, that puffed out over the breast. The chaussure consisted of gaiter-bootees of drab lasting-cloth, tipped with patent leather, and fastened over the front with a silk lace. A broad-brimmed Panama hat completed the dress, and gave the finishing touch ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... a pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia and Earth, whose yawning ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... awoke, and dismal groans and unearthly rumblings struck his terrified ear. "Sally! Sally!" said he, leaping from bed and giving his sleeping spouse a vigorous shake, "why sleepest thou? arise and don thy drab camlet and high-crowned cap, and prepare to meet thy ...
— Eventide - A Series of Tales and Poems • Effie Afton
... said I. "But the circumstances in which he visited it were somewhat drab. Still, it's not an attractive town, and, as the other way's shorter and the road's ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... the full fruition of every hope and faith. Just how this marvelous blossoming would come, she could not guess. Her chances of meeting her Fate were no better than at any moment of the past years of drab disillusionment, and yet, for some reason, her ...
— The Foolish Virgin • Thomas Dixon
... about the sand, Aim them, fling them, And, as my idle arm resumes the knack, Score a hit and laugh To see her stumble hurt, behind the pine trunks. "Unless you work, I throw again, To it and steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. The noon is sultry, Heated and clammy, I, Towards the live waves turning, slip my tunic, Then ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... as if they had been at table too long and showed it, and when he rode out of the woods he saw that the fields, which he remembered as wide, swelling slopes of green, with cattle and colts feeding here and there, were now being ploughed into corrugated stretches of monotonous drab and brown. If he had been there through all the gradual changes of the season, he, probably, would have enjoyed them as much as people ordinarily do; but coming back in this way, the ...
— The Late Mrs. Null • Frank Richard Stockton
... drove out in attendance on Mrs. Grant, but to them she was only an uninteresting shadow that waited on the other's splendour. They often wondered among themselves how Mrs. Grant could have a daughter as drab and uninteresting as Miss Grant; they did not realize how, like a vampire, the older woman lived upon the younger one's vitality. People like Mrs. Grant exist at the expense of those they come in contact with. You either have ...
— To Love • Margaret Peterson
... their eggs; but, from the moment that the knife had made the narrow slit, all the lids were, sooner or later, visited and all, sooner or later, received the white shower somewhere near the gash. The look of the obstacle, therefore, does not count; dull or brilliant, drab or coloured: these are details of no importance; the thing that matters is that there should be a passage to allow ...
— The Wonders of Instinct • J. H. Fabre
... slayer, he is the braver man. So far my text—but the story? Thus, then, it runs; from Spokane Rolled out the overland mail train, late by an hour. In the cab David Shaw, at your service, dressed in his blouse of drab. Grimed by the smoke and the cinders. "Feed her well, Jim," he said; (Jim was his fireman.) "Make up time!" ...
— Successful Recitations • Various
... steady stream going south—a sure indication that all efforts were being concentrated in widening the breach already made. That evening the Battalion returned to the huts at Couin much depressed at the prospect of taking up again the drab monotony of trench life after hopes aroused in the last few days. The weather now became very bad with almost incessant rain, and we relieved the 5th Gloucesters on July 8th in trenches waist deep in water, badly damaged by the bombardment, ...
— The War Service of the 1/4 Royal Berkshire Regiment (T. F.) • Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser Cruttwell
... with sticks, and Joe Willis and the gipsy man have drawn the first lot. So the rest lean against the rails of the stage, and Joe and the dark man meet in the middle, the boards having been strewed with sawdust, Joe's white shirt and spotless drab breeches and boots contrasting with the gipsy's coarse blue shirt and dirty green velveteen breeches and leather gaiters. Joe is evidently turning up his nose at the other, and half insulted at having to break ...
— Tom Brown's Schooldays • Thomas Hughes
... of bed in a twinkling. Life was too full and rich now to waste it in sleep. Yesterday morning it had seemed drab and commonplace. To-day it sparkled with prismatic hues. He was a new man in a ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... appear to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... the piano was small and rather wrinkled, and was wearing an old-fashioned ulster which fitted her small form rather carelessly. The small sealskin cap on her drab hair did not even pretend to be a stylish one. It was rather worn, even in the kindly firelight, and gave an emphasis to the shabbiness of ...
— Miss Pat at Artemis Lodge • Pemberton Ginther
... appeared, brought not as usual by the footman, in scarlet and drab, but by the old butler, in threadbare but well-brushed black, who, as he was placing it on the table, said—'If you please, Sir Christopher, there's the widow Hartopp a-crying i' the still room, and begs leave to ...
— Scenes of Clerical Life • George Eliot
... three storeys, painted a dingy drab and trimmed with dull green shutters. The restaurant occupied almost all of the street front of the ground floor, a blank, non-committal double doorway at one extreme of its plate-glass windows was seldom open and ...
— The Lone Wolf - A Melodrama • Louis Joseph Vance
... Drab has made her brags in three or four places, that I said this and that, and writ to her, and did I know not what—but, upon my reputation, she did me wrong—well, well, that was malice—but I know the bottom of it. She was bribed to that by one we all know—a man too. Only to bring me into ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... September sun was hot. The smoke from the smouldering logs of the camp fire curled thinly upwards. Little chipmunks scuttled out from their holes to the packs, which lay in a heap on the ground, and then scuttled madly back again. A couple of drab-colored whisky-jacks, with bold mien and fearless bright eyes, hopped and fluttered round, picking up the scraps, and uttering an extraordinary variety of notes, mostly discordant; so tame were they that one of them lit on my outstretched arm ...
— Hunting the Grisly and Other Sketches • Theodore Roosevelt
... and surveys himself before the mirror, KATE views him in critical admiration, readjusts his hat several times, and stands off to contemplate her man. MARTIN watches them both, then inspired, takes pencil and cardboard and begins to sketch.] Brown is unutterably drab. It does the most terrible things to me. Put it a little more forward. There—I think ...
— Class of '29 • Orrie Lashin and Milo Hastings
... up a lively air and to its strains the feet of Yerba Buena's first invading army kept uncertain step as sailors and marines toiled through the sand. Half a thousand feet above them stood the quaint adobe customs house, its red-tiled roof and drab adobe walls contrasting pleasantly with the surrounding greenery of terraced hills. Below it lay the Plaza with its flagpole, its hitching racks for ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... nearing Washington now. Every little while they passed bodies of troops marching or encamped along the roads; and once they saw a line of army waggons, drab coloured, with yellow canvas tops, moving slowly in clouds ...
— Ailsa Paige • Robert W. Chambers
... raconteur, could not touch him, he is hopeless. In his spiritual landscape there are no undulations, but it reveals itself as a monotonous dead-level without stream or verdure. He eats, and sleeps, and walks about, but he walks in a spiritual daze. To him life must seem a somber, drab affair. If he were a teacher in a traditional school, he would chill and depress, but he might be tolerated because a sense of humor is not one of the qualifications of the teacher. But, in the vitalized school, he ...
— The Vitalized School • Francis B. Pearson
... farther on, and then spreading its wings for a short flight, and displaying the lovely colours with which it was dyed, the most prominent being shades of blue relieved by delicate fawn and pale warm drab. ...
— Jack at Sea - All Work and no Play made him a Dull Boy • George Manville Fenn
... priests and ministrants were rich with embroideries. "People," said William Morris, "have long since ceased to take in impressions through their eyes," indeed so insensible, so atrophied to colour have the eyes of moderns grown amid their drab surroundings, that the aspect of a building wherein skilful hands have in some small degree essayed to realise the splendour of the past dazes the beholder; a sense of pain rather than of delight possesses him ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... gone five minutes before we heard you fellows poundin' away and bein' pounded at like Jimmy O! I was on the roof with the Chief, the sweat runnin' down into the binoculars, until the veld seemed swarmin' with brown mares and grey linen habits and drab smasher hats, with my wife's head under 'em, and hoverin' troopers. But I did make out that your ...
— The Dop Doctor • Clotilde Inez Mary Graves
... family sat in arm-chairs, and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... "duster." Having exhausted the usual commonplace topics in the course of a monologue that induced no reaction whatever, he voiced a perfectly natural remark about the wonder of sudden riches. He was, in a way, thinking aloud of the changes wrought in drab lives like the Briskows' by the discovery of oil. He ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... wet branches of the undergrowth, but the young leaves lurked within their brown coverings as though they shivered at the thought of venturing out into the bleak air. On the oaks, dead leaves from the past autumn clung obstinately to their mother-branches. The hop-lands were a dreary drab; hop-poles huddled against one another for warmth; streams ran swollen and muddy ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... Red-Breasted Merganser vary from six to twelve, are oval in shape, and are of a yellowish or reddish-drab, sometimes a dull buffy-green. ...
— Birds Illustrated by Color Photography [August, 1897] - A Monthly Serial designed to Promote Knowledge of Bird-Life • Various
... tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat (infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something definite if I could just have ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... sandy-coloured head, inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn importance was blended with a look of unfathomable profundity. He was dressed in a long, brown surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat and drab trousers. A double eye-glass dangled at his waistcoat, and on his head he wore a very low-crowned hat with a broad rim." Every touch is delightful—although all is literal the literalness is all humour. As when Pott, to recreate his guest, Mr. Pickwick, told Jane ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... Miss Juliana happened to come in at that moment, and Mrs. Moon's attention was distracted by the really amazing spectacle presented by her niece. And Miss Juliana, who for five-and-twenty years had never appeared in anything but frowsy drab or dingy grey, Miss Juliana flaunting in silk at four o'clock in the afternoon, Miss Juliana, all shining and shimmering like a silver and mauve chameleon, was a sight to take anybody's breath away. Martha dearly loved a scene, for to be ...
— Superseded • May Sinclair
... death-rattle of the streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs! ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... incorrectly styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes to each knee; and it was de rigueur that the hat ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... leaning her bare elbows, I saw on most days of the week a slim young woman airing herself—a pale-faced, curling-papered, half-bodiced, unwashed drab of a girl, who would have had shame written across her for any one to read if she had not seemed of all women I have ever seen the least shamefaced. Her brows were as unwritten as a child's, her smile as pure as a seraph's, and her eyes blue, unfaltering and candid. ...
— Lore of Proserpine • Maurice Hewlett
... home by myself, and everything answered this wonderful new mood. I knew that life was rapture, and, as I looked back at the fried-fish shop, swimming out of the drab murk, it seemed to me that there could never be anything of such sheer lyrical loveliness outside heaven. I could have screamed for joy of it. I said softly to myself that it was Lovely, Lovely, Lovely; and I danced home, and ...
— Nights in London • Thomas Burke
... breeches Were all cut off the same web, Of a beautiful snuff-colour, Of a modest genty drab; The blue stripe in his stocking, Round his neat slim leg did go, And his ruffles of the cambric fine, They were whiter than the snow. Oh! we ne'er shall see the like of Captain Paton ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various
... voyager saw, Talmage completed the picture in a rainbow paragraph of color: "Along our river and up and down the sides of the great hills there was an indescribable mingling of gold, and orange and crimson and saffron, now sobering into drab and maroon, now flaring up into solferino and scarlet. Here and there the trees looked as if their tips had blossomed into fire. In the morning light the forests seemed as if they had been transfigured and in the evening hours they looked as if the ...
— The Hudson - Three Centuries of History, Romance and Invention • Wallace Bruce
... imitation. Indeed, she was wonderful at this trick of mimicry, a thing most odious to Friends. As I smiled, hearing her, I was aware of my father in the open doorway of the sitting-room, tall, strong, with much iron-gray hair. Within I saw several Friends, large rosy men in drab, with horn buttons and straight collars, their stout legs clad in dark silk hose, without the paste or silver buckles then in use. All wore broad-brimmed, low beavers, and their gold-headed ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... normally he was stimulated by the clean newness of it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed flat—the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing and laughter ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... months. She realised the length and the colour of the time—grey week after grey week, blank month after blank month, void year after void year! And she always getting a little older, getting older in a drab, lifeless time, in a lifeless life, a weary life filled with intolerable craving! She had endured it once, a feeling as if she wanted to go mad.... She picked ...
— Evelyn Innes • George Moore
... pointed, and seeing a man with a gun, gave a startled jump, and pulled up her pony, evidently supposing that we were about to be attacked. "Sha'n't we run?" she began, but then checked herself, as she took in the facts of the drab clothes of the gang and the two armed men in uniform. "They are convicts?" she asked, and when I nodded, she said, "Poor things!" After a pause, she asked, "How long is he in ...
— The Great K. & A. Robbery • Paul Liechester Ford
... mood, no matter what it cheers or destroys. It always laughs. There is no melancholy note in it, no drab, dull color of death such as the flood comes tainted with. Even while it eats away our homes and possessions, it has a certain comfort in its touch and glow if we stand far ...
— The Rustler of Wind River • G. W. Ogden
... young gentlewomen, all standing, and all silent, who curtsied to me when I first came in. They were dressed in a kind of uniform: muslin caps bound round their heads with blue ribbons, plain muslin handkerchiefs, lawn aprons, and drab-coloured stuff gowns. They were all gathered together at a little distance from the table, on which were placed a couple of cold chickens, a salad, and a fruit tart. On the dais there was a smaller round table, on which stood a silver jug filled with milk, and a small roll. Near ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... the same time. Being pretty sure that he recognized his uncle in that venerable figure, Festus came forward stealthily, till he was immediately above the old man's back. The latter was clothed in faded nankeen breeches, speckled stockings, a drab hat, and a coat which had once been light blue, but from exposure as a scarecrow had assumed the complexion and fibre of a dried pudding-cloth. The farmer was, in fact, returning to the hall, which he had left in the morning some time later than his nephew, ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... half her body and two gesticulating arms out of the coach window. She was plainly neither a drab nor in liquor. Harry halted out of range of the splashes to examine and enjoy her. She had been comely, and still could hold a man's eye with her curves of neck and bosom. The piquant features must have been adorable before they sharpened and her cheeks faded and the lines came. Her ...
— The Highwayman • H.C. Bailey
... condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration of beds above full of iron. Except ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... capes and tulle mists of head dresses began to appear between the drab or tattered suits of the bystanders. Among the coming reception guests was Susan Mitchell, co-editor with George Russell ...
— What's the Matter with Ireland? • Ruth Russell
... tell him that the act of love was once deemed a sacred rite, and that I am filled with pride when I think of the noble and exalted world that must have existed before Christian doctrine caused men to look upon women with suspicion and bade them to think of angels instead. Pointing to some poor drab lurking in a shadowy corner he asks, "See! is she not a vile thing?" On this we must part; he is too old to change, and his mind has withered in prejudice and conventions; "a meager mind," I mutter to myself, ...
— Memoirs of My Dead Life • George Moore
... half past nine in the morning; there was only one coach on the stand; one Crane drove the coach; I saw the gentleman get out of the chaise into the coach, he stepped out of the one into the other; I opened the door, and let down the step for him; he had a brown cap on, a dark drab military great coat, and a scarlet coat under it; I only took notice of the lace under it. The gentleman ordered the coach to drive up to Grosvenor-square; I do not remember that he told me the ...
— The Trial of Charles Random de Berenger, Sir Thomas Cochrane, • William Brodie Gurney
... were inaugurating a reign of universal love, brotherhood, and peace through the narrow opening between the upper and the lower knife of the guillotine. His coat is blue: so is his waistcoat; and his nether garments are of a severe drab brown. It is impossible to imagine that any man who assumes such garments could be otherwise than a severe and sanguinary doctrinaire, anxious for his neighbours' blood. The genial smile with which the House of Commons ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... not about time, in our dreary, drab, listless procession of economics, stringing helplessly across the world, that we have a band of music? What economics needs ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... village street. Weston, lanky and erect, moved with a masterful stride, not unlike the lean and keen-witted setter that flashed to and fro over the road before him. At his side was the girl, a slender body in drab, tossing her hat gayly about at the end of its long string. They passed the store and the mill, and at the bend were lost to my view. They seemed to find themselves such good company! Even Tim, so fine and big, had in this homely, lanky man ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... eventually bring me? It would eventually bring me crabbed and crow-footed old age, and fallen arches and a slabsided figure that a range-pinto would shy at. It would bring me empty year after year out here on the edge of Nowhere. It would bring me drab and spiritless drudgery, and faded eyes, and the heart under my ribs slowly but surely growing as dead as a door-nail, and the joy of living just as slowly but surely going out of my life, the same as the royal blue had faded out of ...
— The Prairie Mother • Arthur Stringer
... as good as his word, for, when a noise in my room awoke me in the morning, it was to find him standing by the side of my bed, so composed in his features and so drab in his attire, that it was hard to associate him with the stirring scenes of yesterday and with the repulsive part which he had played in them. Now in the fresh morning sunlight he presented rather the appearance of a pedantic schoolmaster, an impression which was increased by ...
— Uncle Bernac - A Memory of the Empire • Arthur Conan Doyle
... they came, two and two, two and two, two and two, and behind those twos still others, all boys of Johnnie's own age, all dressed just alike, wearing clean khaki uniforms, new flat-brimmed hats of olive-drab, leggings, and polished brown shoes. What they were he did not know, though he guessed them to be rich, noting how proud was their carriage—chins up, backs straight. Beside them walked their leader, a grown young man, slender, and with a tanned face ...
— The Rich Little Poor Boy • Eleanor Gates
... was his own smart gig, drawn by his famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of the sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots, in dry weather and wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets overlapped his hips, and his favorite summer cravat was of ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... specimen at hand when mounting it you should make the best color record you are able. This is true to some extent at least of all coverings of fur, feathers, or scales, and the stronger the light the more damage. I have seen a mounted mink placed in direct sunshine, bleached to a drab and the yellow feathers on a ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... of modern Belgium might have been expected. The worship of colour and form had always been a strong characteristic of the race, and even in the drab years of the Austrian regime Belgian painters had never ceased to work. A far more startling development was the appearance, towards the middle of the nineteenth century, of a national Belgian school of literature. In the Middle ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... of black smoke suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... Dominie's Log I confessed that I liked to cheat the railway company, and I excused it on the ground that "a ten-mile journey without a ticket is the only romantic experience left in a drab world." That was a delightful bit of rationalisation. The real reason for my delinquency lay in my unconscious. As a child I impotently rebelled against the authority of parents and teachers. Later in life I unconsciously identified the railway company with the ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... hand, thinking gratefully of her sister Mary who in addition to her work as superintendent of the neighborhood public school, supervised the household at 7 Madison Street. Hotel rooms were cold and drab, the food was uninviting, and only occasionally did she find to her delight "a Christian cup of coffee."[316] She often felt that the Lyceum Bureau drove her unnecessarily hard, routed her inefficiently, and profited too generously ...
— Susan B. Anthony - Rebel, Crusader, Humanitarian • Alma Lutz
... its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, the windows looked on a ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... the exclamation next day; and many loving eyes followed the little figure in the drab frock as it went quietly about, doing for the last time the small services which would help to make its absence keenly felt. Polly was to go directly after an early dinner, and having packed her trunk, all but one tray, she ...
— An Old-fashioned Girl • Louisa May Alcott
... well-built, although he walked with a slouching gait. He wore corduroy trousers fastened round the waist by a narrow strap, and a blue shirt, with an unbuttoned jacket of fustian. On his head was a limp-brimmed, dirty, drab felt hat, and in his left hand he carried a red handkerchief, which apparently contained all his possessions, and in his right a stout stick which had been obviously cut from a hedge. His hair was extremely short and black, but he could not have shaved for some days; his face was deeply sunburnt ...
— Chatterbox, 1905. • Various
... contact with a display of spurious passion which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson tells us that Prior's Chloe "was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species." The case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It enables us to gauge the ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... Jameson had carelessly thrown open his coat and vest. Underneath he wore the usual sailor-jersey. Thomas steeled his arms. With one hand he pulled the roll collar away from the man's neck and with the other sought for the string: sought in vain. The light, the four drab walls, the haze of tobacco smoke, all ...
— The Voice in the Fog • Harold MacGrath
... or the advertisement itself. The telegram is before me as I write. It would appear to have been handed in at Vere Street at eight o'clock in the morning of May 11, 1897, and received before half-past at Holloway B.O. And in that drab region it duly found me, unwashen but at work before the day grew ...
— Raffles - Further Adventures of the Amateur Cracksman • E. W. Hornung
... the end of the eighteenth century, governments were so bad that an immense increase of wealth, intelligence, and happiness was bound to come merely from making a clean sweep of obsolete institutions. Shelley's Radicalism was not of this drab hue. He was incapable of soberly studying the connections between causes and effects an incapacity which comes out in the distaste he felt for history—and his conception of the ideal at which the reformer should aim was vague and fantastic. In both these ...
— Shelley • Sydney Waterlow
... to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the useful, of the improvable by economic ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... safe to pass the hemlock, when it's on fire. I'll go with you till you get beyond that," said uncle Nathan, taking his drab overcoat from a nail ...
— The Old Homestead • Ann S. Stephens
... against it. And—and—there won't be another, Harvey. All women are sacred to me for her sake, but I couldn't any more marry than I could—could stop feeling her sitting beside me, just a little way off, wrapped in her drab shawl, with her face—like a glimpse through the ...
— The Plum Tree • David Graham Phillips
... waters, leaving ribboned pathways behind that crossed and recrossed like a chart of the stars; proud white pleasure-yachts, great vessels from all ports in the world; and an occasional battle-ship, drab and stealthy. And the hundred pink and white villages, the jade and amethyst of the near and far islands, the smiling terraces above the city, the ruined temples, the grim ...
— The Lure of the Mask • Harold MacGrath
... one of these colloquies. He was a plebeian himself, and this glimpse of the petty lives of the poor, this peep into sordid existences of idle sloth and spiritless resignation, stirred all the blood in his veins. In an instant, as he stood between the two old crones, with their drab faces and no outlook on life save that of the streets, now gloomy and empty, now full of sunshine and crowded traffic, the young man learned more of human conditions than he had ever been taught at school. His thoughts ...
— The Aspirations of Jean Servien • Anatole France
... should be selected with due regard to the species of garment and the tone of the complexion. If the face be of that faint drab which your friends would designate pallid, and your enemies sallow, a coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, must necessarily ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... unaccountable weariness of spirit, I stood within the lobby looking out upon the grayness of London in November. A slight mental effort was sufficient to blot out that drab prospect and to conjure up before my mind's eye a balcony overlooking the Nile—a glimpse of dusty palms, a white wall overgrown with purple blossoms, and above all the dazzling vault of Egypt. Upon the balcony my imagination painted a figure, ...
— The Hand Of Fu-Manchu - Being a New Phase in the Activities of Fu-Manchu, the Devil Doctor • Sax Rohmer
... demure assertion she failed of justice to herself, but her eyes were sparkling. She knew that hereabout in this rude world of hers her people were accounted both godly and worthy of respect, but after all it was a drab and poverty-ridden world with slow and torpid pulses of being. Here, she found, in indisputable proof, the record of her "fore-parents". Once they, too, had been ladies and gentlemen familiar with elegant ways and circumstances as vague ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... things must dazzle us by their preternatural light; others must hold us in suspense, and tempt our curiosity to explore their obscurity. Those who would dispel these various illusions, to give us their drab-coloured creation in their stead, are not very wise. Let the naturalist, if he will, catch the glow-worm, carry it home with him in a box, and find it next morning nothing but a little grey worm; let the poet or the lover of poetry visit it at evening, when beneath the scented hawthorn and the ...
— Lectures on the English Poets - Delivered at the Surrey Institution • William Hazlitt
... study, the door of which stands slightly ajar. Amanda Danby is there alone. She is sitting in the master's big chair with a volume of poems in her hand—forgetting the party, forgetting that she has laboriously smoothed her curly hair for the occasion, forgetting that she is wearing her precious drab merino—her mother's wedding gown—now made over for the fourth time, forgetting the new collar and pretty blue bow at her throat (Dorry's gifts), conscious ...
— Donald and Dorothy • Mary Mapes Dodge
... suited it exactly. His predecessor, Mr. Simon Saunders, had been a small, wrinkled, spare old gentleman, with a short cough and a thin voice, who always seemed as if he needed an apothecary himself. He wore generally a full suit of drab, a flaxen wig of the sort called a Bob Jerom, and a very tight muslin stock; a costume which he had adopted in his younger days in imitation of the most eminent physician of the next city, and continued to the time of his death. Perhaps the cough might have been originally an imitation also, ingrafted ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... at work in the log he was sitting on, scra-ape! scra-ape! scr-r-rape! deep in the soft, dry pulp under the bark. There were no insects abroad except the white-faced pine hornets, crawling stiffly across the moss. He noticed no birds, either, at first, until, glancing up, he saw a great drab butcher-bird staring at ...
— A Young Man in a Hurry - and Other Short Stories • Robert W. Chambers
... in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... move. This is our first day's trek, and we are at a place where we have been before—but not the same billets. I am in a cottage with an earth floor (which looks very odd with a hideous drab-coloured wall-paper), and small children and hens, both dirty, wander in and out of my room. It's too hot to keep the door latched. A swallow's nest in the room next door; and the people say that, although the young have flown, they ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... standing before the Columbus statue in the Piazza Acquaverdi. Weems was such a mighty squeamish little creature about the proprieties that I thought an old dunnage-sack would scandalize him, and so had purchased a drab portmanteau for my kit at the cost of half my remaining capital. I intended to have no more breezes with him if ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... advanced thinkers of the moment: Is Monogamy Feasible? or Can Men and Women be Friends? D'Annunzio is not to be approached either in a mood of radical earnestness or of evangelical fervor. He must be regarded as an artist of sensations, an Italian of the Renaissance set down in the middle of a drab century. He began his life by a quest for perfect physical pleasure through all the senses, and inaugurated its last phase with a gesture of military courage which was not only a retort to those who, like Croce, ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day of our ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... down the hill Eric met a shambling, old gray horse drawing an express wagon which had seen better days. The driver was a woman: she appeared to be one of those drab-tinted individuals who can never have felt a rosy emotion in all their lives. She stopped her horse, and beckoned Eric over to her with the knobby handle of ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... silence drab Paints music; hooting motors stab The pleasant peace; and, far and faint, The ...
— An Anthology of Australian Verse • Bertram Stevens
... looked out upon the cheerless drab roofs of the barracks, with their wisps of pale smoke swirling upward into the leaden sky; counted the dozen gnarled and scrubby trees, as had become a habit with him; rested his eyes upon the black and shriveled remnants of ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... her lips and the warm light in her deep slate-coloured eyes burning down, down into my very vitals. In that one rich, welcome smile all my calm English months melted like wax in a furnace, and Oxford was a drab dream and Surrey a stupid sick-bay! As I faced her, the old wound burst and widened, with that torturing sweet shock that I had relegated sagely to poets and youthful heats, and I knew that I loved her hopelessly, with a love that put out my love for Roger and ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... of a romantic maiden who, prone to choose her novels by title, has set down on her library list The Price of Love (METHUEN), and finds herself landed with one of Mr. ARNOLD BENNETT'S intimate little guides to "Bursley" and the four other drab towns. And yet if she will set her teeth and read the first fifty pages without skipping she will discover that she is being let into real secrets of real human hearts; that handsome Rachel (penniless companion to a benign old lady), ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, October 21, 1914 • Various
... when brown stone was the only builders' medium New York must have been a drab city indeed; or so I gather from the few ancient typical residences that remain. There are a few that are new, too, but for the most part the modern house is of white stone. Gayest of all is, I suppose, that vermilion-roofed florist's on ...
— Roving East and Roving West • E.V. Lucas
... and properly brewed, produces a natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... more or less olivaceous in some eggs, the markings even in this type being generally densest towards the large end, where they form an irregular mottled cap: in the other type the ground is a very pale greenish-drab colour; there is a dense confluent raw-sienna-coloured zone round the large end, and only a few spots and specks of the same colour scattered about the rest of the egg. All kinds of intermediate varieties occur. The texture of the shell is ...
— The Nests and Eggs of Indian Birds, Volume 1 • Allan O. Hume
... south of Santa Catalina, out in the Pacific, open to wind and fog, scorched by sun, and beaten on every shore by contending tides. Seen from afar, the island seems a bleak, long, narrow strip of drab rock rising from a low west end to the dignity of a mountain near the east end. Seen close at hand, it is still barren, bleak, and drab; but it shows long golden slopes of wild oats; looming, gray, lichen-colored ...
— Tales of Fishes • Zane Grey
... woman." In his "Journal to Stella" for August 6th, 1711, Swift writes: "We have a music meeting in our town [Windsor] to-night. I went to the rehearsal of it, and there was Margarita and her sister, and another drab, and a parcel of fiddlers; I was weary, and would not go to the meeting, which I am sorry for, because I heard it was a great assembly." (See present edition, vol. ...
— The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, Vol. III.: Swift's Writings on Religion and the Church, Vol. I. • Jonathan Swift
... twenty, had no special nationality about him from which one could guess how he came by his rather uncommon names. He was reputed to be learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,—this prevalent tint being infused also into the cornea or "white" of his eye,—and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment at table, where ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... is our first day's trek, and we are at a place where we have been before—but not the same billets. I am in a cottage with an earth floor (which looks very odd with a hideous drab-coloured wall-paper), and small children and hens, both dirty, wander in and out of my room. It's too hot to keep the door latched. A swallow's nest in the room next door; and the people say that, although the young have flown, they still ...
— Letters to Helen - Impressions of an Artist on the Western Front • Keith Henderson
... coarse dry grass like an old man's beard, there were ragged chasms and gulfs, and all in raw reds and toneless browns and drabs, darkened constantly by the smoke which descended upon them from the chimneys of the great factories to the right. Over this raw red and toneless drab surface crawled, on narrow tracks, little wagons, drawn by plodding old horses, guided by plodding men. Beyond, the salt river gleamed with a keen brightness like steel. The sky above it was dull and brooding. The wind was ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... harbor in these parts! But what's this? colors half-mast?" exclaimed the captain, as he caught sight of a little pouch, woven together of bright colored basket stuff, slung over her shoulder; a little drab paw, darting from out its deepest recesses in pursuit of a tantalizing curl, soon explains how matters stand, and a voice of the greatest feline sweetness is heard in reply to divers catlike salutations, ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... under circumstances such as these, is heroism still. But I want to lay down the principle that such heroism is of a type inferior to that performed under the drab, uninspiring, familiar circumstances of daily life. The soldier who goes marching into battle with the flag before his eyes and wild music in his ears, is a brave man—but the sailor who leaps into the foaming sea, the miner who descends into the flaming pit, the locomotive engineer who ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, ...
— Middlemarch • George Eliot
... of impending evil. The slaans propelling the boats were stolid and grim. Not for them, this dalliance. Not for their women, this music and laughter, these daring costumes to display their beauty. The slaan women, drab with work, were slinking about unnoticed. Often I would see a boat of them slip by, furtively, in the shadows. Drab women, watching these beauties, resentful, sullen—and with what purpose smouldering in their hearts I ...
— Tarrano the Conqueror • Raymond King Cummings
... Bursley is not merely one single stupid English provincial town. His Baineses and Clayhangers are not simply average middle class provincials foredoomed to humdrum and the drab shadows of experience. His Bursley is every provincial town, his Baineses are all townspeople whatsoever under the sun. He professes nothing of the kind; but with quiet smiling patience, with a multitude of impalpable touches, clothes his scene and its humble figures ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... the trouble is I don't want to wait that long. Now, for instance, who lives over there on my left; the square white house with the drab blinds?" ...
— The Lilac Girl • Ralph Henry Barbour
... to possess one hundred and twenty pounds in two years. His employers had knowledge of his deeds, and they summoned him to them and said to him that because of the drab shabbiness of his clothes and his dishonest acts they had ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... was one of those lyceum halls, of which almost every village has now its own, dedicated to that sober and pallid, or rather drab-colored, mode of winter-evening entertainment, the lecture. Of late years this has come strangely into vogue, when the natural tendency of things would seem to be to substitute lettered for oral methods of addressing the public. But, in halls like this, besides ...
— The Blithedale Romance • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... of the truth, might have been really useful. As it is, he has only helped to lead them astray. Indeed, it is much to be feared that these hasty students of a big subject have by the perusal of Mr. Williams's neatly-turned sentences and epigrammatic phrases acquired an impression which no drab-coloured statement of simple fact will ever be ...
— Are we Ruined by the Germans? • Harold Cox
... in this spirit and as mind had affected the colour of the Puritans' clothes, so in turn the drab clothes, prescribed by their new creed, helped to remove colour from the New ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... had drifted level with the eaves. Ichabod stood in the narrow window frame, and, lowering the glass from the top, beat a hole upward with a pole to admit air. Through the tunnel thus formed there filtered the dull gray light of day: and at its end, obstructing, there stood revealed a slanting drab wall,—a condensed milky way. ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... Kilburn and all over South London, all about which life teems and roars but where, along their own pavements, no life is. They are most characteristic of themselves, these streets, when, as often to be seen, there is no soul along them but a sad drab that is an itinerant singer that drifts along wailing, at every few paces shuffling her body in complete turns to scan the windows she has passed and the immediate windows on either hand. She has no home and these are not homes to ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... marsh, were about fifteen feet from the ground. The space between the inn wall and the beehive curve of the hill, which was very narrow under Mr. Glenthorpe's window, but widened as the hill fell away, was covered with a russet-coloured clay, which contrasted vividly with the sombre grey and drab ...
— The Shrieking Pit • Arthur J. Rees
... women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... a magnificent skin, father," cried Dick, as he stood admiring the creamy drab, splashed and spotted with great patches of a rich yellowish brown. "What a monster, and ...
— Off to the Wilds - Being the Adventures of Two Brothers • George Manville Fenn
... discussing self- control, we must here steer clear of religious controversy and phrase what we have to say in the colder terms of "mere morality." And though there will be a great loss in feeling, in persuasiveness and unction thereby, there will be gain in clearness. It is possible to express in the drab tones of morality the profound insights which have made religion the great guide to happiness; and even the man who deems himself irreligious may, if he takes to heart these more prosaic counsels, find something of the peace that has been ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake
... teeth; and a pair of blue eyes, that seemed to look about them on surrounding objects with habitual contempt. His head composed full one-fourth of his whole length, and the cue that depended from its rear occupied another. He wore a coat of very light drab cloth, with buttons as large as dollars, bearing the impression of a foul anchor. The skirts were extremely long, reaching quite to the calf, and were broad in proportion. Beneath, there were a vest and breeches of red plush, somewhat worn and soiled. ...
— The Pioneers • James Fenimore Cooper
... Basil's Cathedral at the far end, and unbelievable candy-cane construction of fanciful spirals, and every-colored turrets; the red marble mausoleum, Mecca of world Communism, housing the prophet Lenin and his two disciples; the long drab length of the GUM department store opposite. But it ...
— Combat • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... in silence. Then his lacklustre eyes brightened, his drab features turned scarlet and, suddenly striking the table with his fist, he ...
— The Teeth of the Tiger • Maurice Leblanc
... region, made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... another. I may as well tell you she took any lovers she could get at Rouen—even coachmen! Yes, indeed, madame—the coachman at the prefecture! I know it for a fact, for he buys his wine of us. And now that it is a question of getting us out of a difficulty she puts on virtuous airs, the drab! For my part, I think this officer has behaved very well. Why, there were three others of us, any one of whom he would undoubtedly have preferred. But no, he contents himself with the girl who is common property. ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... emerged from the sitting-room. He was a pale man, with a beard of mixed grey-and-drab, and a voice of the ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... it and the air of bustle; but to-day it seemed flat—the tiled floor, like a bathroom, the ocher-colored metal ceiling, the faded maps on the hard plaster walls, the chairs of varnished pale oak, the desks and filing-cabinets of steel painted in olive drab. It was a vault, a steel chapel where loafing ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... parts where a good shower of rain has fallen, the stridulous piercing notes of the cicadae are perfectly deafening; a drab-colored cricket joins the chorus with a sharp sound, which has as little modulation as the drone of a Scottish bagpipe. I could not conceive how so small a thing could raise such a sound; it seemed to make the ground over it thrill. ...
— Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa - Journeys and Researches in South Africa • David Livingstone
... aspect, and the visitor could not select a better place to begin his tour of the city. Due to the monotonous regularity of the streets and the all-pervading soft coal smoke, Chicago presents on the whole a somewhat drab appearance, but the view from Grant Park or from the lake front (with Michigan Ave. in the foreground) is nearly, if not quite, as fine as anything N.Y. has to offer. In Michigan Ave. are the Public Library (with a beautiful ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... drew bridles in the yellowing October forest. Their smart drab uniforms touched with purple blended harmoniously with the autumn woods. They were as inconspicuous as two deer in the dappled shadow. There was a sunny clearing just ahead. The wood road they had been travelling entered it. Beyond ...
— The Flaming Jewel • Robert Chambers
... War, they say, is hell; it's heaven, too. It lets a man discover what he's worth. It takes his measure, shows what he can do, Gives him a joy like nothing else on earth. It fans in him a flame that otherwise Would flicker out, these drab, discordant days; It teaches him in pain and sacrifice Faith, fortitude, grim courage past all praise. Yes, War is good. So here beside my slain, A happy wreck I wait amid the din; For even if I perish ...
— Rhymes of a Red Cross Man • Robert W. Service
... the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes to each knee; and it was de rigueur that the hat ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... the tendency of the populace to make trochees of all dissyllables. In a graver tone we might complain that he sometimes—rarely—writes, not by vocation of the ancient Muses, who were daughters of Memory and immortal Zeus, but of those Muses in drab and scoop-bonnets who are daughters of Memory and George Fox. Some lines of the "Brown of Ossawatomie" we are thinking of now. We can regard them only as a reminiscence ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 13, No. 77, March, 1864 • Various
... never quite make myself believe that it was real when a brilliant group of horsemen in pointed, yellow hats and streaming, peacock feathers dashed down the street. It seemed too impossible that I, a wandering naturalist of the drab, prosaic twentieth century, and my American wife were really a living, breathing part of this strange drama of ...
— Across Mongolian Plains - A Naturalist's Account of China's 'Great Northwest' • Roy Chapman Andrews
... all means," he whispered. "Why you wept in the station, why you invented the story of the actress, why you came here to brighten my drab exile—what this whole comedy of Baldpate Inn amounts to, anyhow? I assure you I am as innocent of understanding it as is the czar of Russia on ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... Saturdays dedicated by a growing tradition to this or that national expression, the Ninety-ninth Regiment, to a flare of music that made the heart leap out against its walls, turned into a scene thus swept clean for it, a wave of olive drab, impeccable row after impeccable row of scissors-like legs advancing. Recruits, raw if you will, but already caparisoned, sniffing and scenting, as it were, for the great primordial mire ...
— Americans All - Stories of American Life of To-Day • Various
... perception that this charm, warming like a flame, was also all-revealing like a great light; giving new depth to shades, new brilliance to colours, an amazing vividness to all sensations and vitality to all thoughts: so that all that had been lived before seemed to have been lived in a drab world and with a ...
— The Arrow of Gold - a story between two notes • Joseph Conrad
... half-snarling fashion, he dearly loved this forest country in which he had been born and bred, while he was too keen a sportsman to be unobservant of any aspect of wind and weather, any movement of bird or beast. With the collar of his long drab driving-coat turned up about his ears, and the stem of a well-coloured meerschaum pipe between his teeth, he sat huddled together in the high, swinging gig, with Timothy, the weazel-faced, old groom by his side, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... wights! It is they who are paying for the war. Sightless soldiers led by little children come selling you sticking-plaster in the restaurants. Germany is too poor to care for them. It is they who are paying for the war. The drab, many-headed middle class of Berlin with its poverty-stricken breakfast-table, the old black bread of the war and no sugar and paper table-cloths; the women going about the streets with great bundles on their backs; ...
— Europe—Whither Bound? - Being Letters of Travel from the Capitals of Europe in the Year 1921 • Stephen Graham
... drab cloak, stood with arms outstretched in the crater land. Her sparkling robe sheathed her in glory and she sang softly, rapt in her own delight. Then Dandtan put his arm about her; she clung to him, staring about ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... connected with dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to live in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls—and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular New York had no peer—in ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... series with the electrified wire over which the inventor hoped to send his messages. For three years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... superb view of the Danube and its junction with the Save, is a really charming park known as the Slopes of Dreaming, where, on fine evenings, almost the entire population of the capital appears to be promenading, the rather drab appearance of an urban crowd being brightened by the gaily embroidered costumes of the peasants and the silver-trimmed uniforms of the ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... which the little building had been constructed, still in their native bark, blended so perfectly with the drab hillside beyond, that for the moment none of us caught the distant outlines. Tim possessed the keenest sight, and his voice was first ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... prison, and the chimneys wanted sweeping. And so he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs because he wore smart clothes, and other people ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... down before his desk and gazed listlessly out of the window. The day arose before him in prospect, drab, desolate, and dreary. High up overhead, through the dingy panes, he could see the little fleecy clouds floating about in peaceful unconcern. May was a slack month. And at its end came June—June, with its four weeks' inventory period ...
— Stubble • George Looms
... closer observation one proved to be the taller, one the plumper, and one decidedly the younger of the three; then, although they were dressed so exactly alike,—according to what be, I suspect, a sumptuary law in England—and although their stout travelling-dresses, drab cloaks, thick boots, the shaggy shawls severally carried by each on one arm, the faded blue cravats tied round their throats, were so precisely alike and had been subjected to so exactly the same amount of wear that you could have sworn each article was its fellow, you know you did detect ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... the new captain, who arrived the day after we had finished loading, on the very eve of the day of sailing. I first beheld him on the quay, a complete stranger to me, obviously not a Hollander, in a black bowler and a short drab overcoat, ridiculously out of tone with the winter aspect of the waste-lands, bordered by the brown fronts of houses with their ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... loving some one more than oneself! And oh, the blessedness of toiling together for something greater and more important than either! That is what makes it possible for the other thing to endure—not merely for a few mad, glad years, followed by drab duty and dull regret, but for a happy lifetime of useful vigor. That, and not leisure or dignity, is the great ...
— How To Write Special Feature Articles • Willard Grosvenor Bleyer
... to like a drab-coloured world hung round with dusky shreds of philosophy is sufficiently obvious. These persons find any relaxation they may require from a too severe course of theories, religious, political, social, or now, alas! historical, in the novels of Mr. W. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... married, Donna," he told her, when there came to him for the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert, "we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful country ...
— The Long Chance • Peter B. Kyne
... individual dressed in sober drab; he proposed to buy a horse and wagon and sell oats in bags, trusting that no one would be particular ...
— A Unique Story of a Marvellous Career. Life of Hon. Phineas T. • Joel Benton
... fool!" he ground out savagely. "That drab you make such a to-do about has been mine this two ...
— Athelstane Ford • Allen Upward
... Whittier, whose swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all that ...
— The World's Best Poetry — Volume 10 • Various
... little of all the female virtues? Why, Sally Salisbury's niece! and the equal of Sally herself for worthless good looks and behaviour. She is not yet well known to the town or I could not have been so took in. But you will recall that Molly Skerret observed the likeness to that drab Sally on seeing her. Good Heaven, that I had heeded, ...
— The Ladies - A Shining Constellation of Wit and Beauty • E. Barrington
... a long, straight, brick-built street in the far East End of London—one of those lifeless streets, made of two drab walls upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end, suggesting petrified diagrams proving dead problems—stands a house that ever draws me to it; so that often, when least conscious of ...
— Paul Kelver • Jerome Klapka, AKA Jerome K. Jerome
... on crown of head, frontlet, wings, and tail, which are black. Whitish markings on wings give effect of bands. Tail with white on inner webs. In winter plumage: Head yellow-olive; no frontlet; black drab, with reddish tinge; shoulders and throat yellow; soiled brownish white underneath. Female — Brownish olive above, yellowish white beneath. Range — North America, from the tropics to the Fur Countries and westward to ...
— Bird Neighbors • Neltje Blanchan
... in the very act of removing the binoculars from his eyes his keen sight detected what appeared to be an infinitesimally small moving dot against the bare drab face of the cliff, some two miles away. Focussing his glasses afresh upon the spot, Dick watched it steadily for two or three minutes until he became certain that it was moving. Yes, moving downward along the cliff face ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... me before upon the green settee are familiar with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... reflection the Chief Inspector was driven westward through the early morning traffic. Fine rain was falling, and the streets presented that curiously drab appearance which only London streets can present in all its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought for places inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and tragedies were to be witnessed upon the highways; ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... question, we think, by those who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules; amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations of "that noble and liberal casuist" (as Shakspeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We confess we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... were endangered. The greater industrialists sold themselves. A higher stratum of the middle-classes composed of certain circles of higher teachers and subaltern officials took the business seriously, and in order to escape from their drab existence created that atmosphere of hatred of Socialists, telegrams of homage, and megalomania, which made us intellectually and morally impossible before the world. Instead of the Germany of thought and spirit one saw suddenly a brutal, ...
— The New Society • Walther Rathenau
... Raymounts were one by one assembling to break their fast, was discolored and dark, whether with age or smoke it would have needed more than a glance to say. The reds had grown brown, and the blues a dirty slate-color, while an impression of drab was prevalent. But the fire was burning as if it had been at it all night and was glorying in having at length routed the darkness; and in the middle of the table on the white cloth, stood a shallow piece of red pottery ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... French gentlemen, who, being poor, have to make money in commerce. They leave their swords with a magistrate, and when they are become rich enough take them back again. There is some pleasing ceremony, but I forget. The Wynnes have been long enough in drab and trade. It is time we took back our swords, and quitted ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... magistrate of a small republic, and invariably says he will consider, that he must refer to his council. He wears the antique dress of the first settlers in this colony." Then the marquis goes on to tell how the small old man, in his single-breasted, drab-colored coat, tight knee-breeches, and muslin wrist-ruffles, walked up to the table where twenty hussar officers were waiting and with "formal stiffness pronounced in a loud voice a long prayer in the form, ...
— Once Upon A Time In Connecticut • Caroline Clifford Newton
... return to the outward simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more round- hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat, and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of the American lower class ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... are who hanker for a touch of colour, So to relieve their sombre air; For me, I like my clothes to be much duller Than what the nigger minstrels wear; I hold by sable, drab and grey; I do not ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, January 14, 1920 • Various
... were, flies and beetles hummed and buzzed, and beat their gauzy wings, so that they seemed invisible, while wherever there was a bare patch of stony or rocky earth lizards were hurrying in and out, and now and then a drab-looking little serpent lay twisted up into ...
— Bunyip Land - A Story of Adventure in New Guinea • George Manville Fenn
... slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... places to her, and him and him were the same person. A girl of that type comes to a bad end: he had seen it often, the type and the end, and never separate. Can one not prophesy from facts? He saw a slut in a slum, a drab hovering by a dark entry, and the vision cheered him mightily for one glowing minute and left him unoccupied for the next, into which she thronged with the flutter of wings and the sound ...
— Mary, Mary • James Stephens
... red and green, may not be used in equal quantities in the dress, as they are both so positive in tone that they divide and distract the attention. When two colors are worn in any quantity, one must approach a neutral tint, such as gray or drab. Black may be worn with any color, though it looks best with the lighter shades of the different colors. White may also be worn with any color, though it looks best with the darker tones. Thus white and crimson, black and pink, each contrast better and have a ...
— Our Deportment - Or the Manners, Conduct and Dress of the Most Refined Society • John H. Young
... so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... known the place yourself. The ceiling had been whitened. The faded drab woodwork had been painted white. The walls had been colored a beautiful soft yellow. Back of the counter a series of shelves, glassed in by sliding doors, ran the whole length of the wall and nearly to the ceiling. Behind the show case ...
— Maida's Little Shop • Inez Haynes Irwin
... how you begin?' Robert looked round the room, but he got no ideas from the faded green curtains, or the drab Venetian blinds, or the worn brown oil-cloth on the floor. Even the new carpet suggested nothing, though its pattern was a very wonderful one, and always seemed as though it were just going to ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... well escape a stranger's notice; for it was covered with looking-glass, and matched another narrow mirror in shape and size. This door led into a very long room, as plain and even sordid as the drawing-room was inviting: the unpapered walls were a cold drab, and wanted washing; there was a thick cobweb up in one corner, and from the ceiling hung the tail of another, which the housemaid's broom had scotched not killed: that side of the room they entered by was all books. The servant said, "Stay here a moment, sir, and ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... was deserted, lonely, as though nor man nor beast had ever trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At last, I looked and saw nothing more. ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... hips—which I flatter myself no one but myself and my friend Mr. Cooke really do understand. The vapid smoothness of the door dummy, my lard, should be confined to the regions of the Strand. Mr. Elliot, where are you? Just be so good as to show his lardship that lovely new thing in drab and blue fonce. Ah! your lardship can't wait.—Now, my good woman, ...
— Alton Locke, Tailor And Poet • Rev. Charles Kingsley et al
... went to the Gaite to see the performance of "La Grace de Dieu." Quenu, in a frock-coat and drab gloves, with his hair carefully pomatumed and combed, was occupied most of the time in hunting for the names of the performers in the programme. Lisa looked superb in her low dress as she rested her hands in their ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... their speaking and their remaining silent, his seeing them in secret trysts, the moving about from house to house and room to room, the singing of songs, his experiences with the Doermaul opera company, the light thrown on his drab life by a mask, his friend and the help he had received from him, his separation from him, the brush-maker's house on St. James's Place, the three queer old maids in the Long Row, the days he spent at Castle Erfft, the old father of the two sisters and his strange doings—all ...
— The Goose Man • Jacob Wassermann
... varieties of the jackets of our post-boys, blue or yellow, as supposed to indicate the politics of their inns, were interesting to us, as everything was interesting then. Otherwise their equipment was exactly alike— neat drab corduroy breeches and top-boots, and hats usually white, and they were all boys, though the red faces and grizzled hair of some looked as if they had faced the weather ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... to look at her, and as he did so he found to his great joy that his stiff white collar had disappeared. So, too, had the drab serge suit and the clumsy hob-nailed boots that had hurt him so. Instead, he wore a single garment of some soft brown, the colour of earth, girdled by a broad green belt that felt like velvet. His feet were bare, and as he buried them in the thick grass on which ...
— The Junior Classics Volume 8 - Animal and Nature Stories • Selected and arranged by William Patten
... say the fabric Was wrought of faery woof, Not made in walls of drab brick Nor won with mortal oof; Delicate, dream-like, pretty As sunshine after rain, Worn by Miss Hodgson ("Kitty")— It seems a dreadful pity ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 25, 1919 • Various
... the ground, a staff topped with a white streamer marking a temporary trading ground. These were Salariki right enough but they did not wear the colorful garb of those about them, instead they were all clad alike in muffling, sleeved robes of a drab green—the storm priests—their robes denoting the color of the Sargolian sky just before the onslaught of their worst tempests. Cam had not left many clues concerning the religion of the Salariki, but ...
— Plague Ship • Andre Norton
... friend, John Hallett, suited it exactly. His predecessor, Mr. Simon Saunders, had been a small, wrinkled, spare old gentleman, with a short cough and a thin voice, who always seemed as if he needed an apothecary himself. He wore generally a full suit of drab, a flaxen wig of the sort called a Bob Jerom, and a very tight muslin stock; a costume which he had adopted in his younger days in imitation of the most eminent physician of the next city, and continued to the time of his death. Perhaps the cough might have been originally an imitation ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 10, No. - 288, Supplementary Number • Various
... Staten Island ferry is a voyage on the Seven Seas for the landlubber, After months of office work, how one's heart leaps to greet our old mother the sea! How drab, flat, and humdrum seem the ways of earth in comparison to the hardy and austere life of ships! There on every hand go the gallant shapes of vessels—the James L. Morgan, dour little tug, shoving two barges; Themistocles, ...
— Shandygaff • Christopher Morley
... the great fear of physical injury, and oblivious to the people around us. We passed the Underground Station. Our flight down the Euston Road was extraordinary. Sarakoff was in front, his dressing-gown flying, and his pink pyjamas making a vivid area of colour in the drab street. I followed a few yards in the rear, hatless, with my breath coming ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... with Jews and Judaism, and to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg, ex-M.P., and nearly all his wealthy guests, ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... to Paris, too, and although it was worn by many who did not hold the King's commission but swaggered it as something in the Red Cross—God knows what!—the drab of its colour gave a thrill to all those people of Paris who, at least in the first months of the war, were stirred with an immense sentiment of gratitude because England had come to the rescue in her hour of need, and had given her blood generously to France, ...
— The Soul of the War • Philip Gibbs
... narrow passage from the door of entrance to the room, which was on the east, dividing the rows of benches. General Washington stopped at the end to let Mr. Adams pass to the chair. The latter always wore a full suit of bright drab, with lash or loose cuffs to his coat. He always wore wrist ruffles. He had not changed his fashions. He was a short man, with a good head. With his family he attended our church twice a day. General Washington's dress was a full suit of ...
— Washington and the American Republic, Vol. 3. • Benson J. Lossing
... wondered. He had nothing to do but listen, and watch the man on the bank who led the horse that was towing the barge; or address a rare remark to his solitary companion—an old sailor, dressed in a sou'-wester, blue jersey, and the invariable drab trowsers, tar-besprent, and long boots, of his calling, who steered automatically, facing the meadows in beautiful abstraction. He would have faced an Atlantic gale, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... for them, these fellow-clerks, and I often wondered at their contentment with the drab lives they led, at their self-congratulation for "having a ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... this country. Our bird is smaller, and is much more solitary and unsocial. Its color is totally different from the Old World bird, the latter being speckled, or a kind of dominick, while ours is of the finest cinnamon-brown or drab above, and bluish white beneath, with a gloss and richness of texture in the plumage that suggests silk. The bird has also mended its manners in this country, and no longer foists its eggs and young upon other birds, but builds a nest ...
— Locusts and Wild Honey • John Burroughs
... but there's a difference, Mr. Floyd; I wish he had your true blue yeoman's honour, and the spirit that becomes his father's son: if the lad was mine, I'd cut him off with a shilling, to buy a halter for his drab of a wife. Dang it, Mrs. Floyd, it'll never do to see so queer a Mrs. Jonathan Junior, a standing in your tidy shoes beside ...
— The Complete Prose Works of Martin Farquhar Tupper • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... as they thronged about her,—the slender dark child of the breed of a leader. The new manta was of yellow wool and cotton, bordered with dull green and little squares of flaming scarlet woven in it by patient Indian hands of the far south coast. It made her look a bit royal in the midst of the drab-colored, weary band. ...
— The Treasure Trail - A Romance of the Land of Gold and Sunshine • Marah Ellis Ryan
... that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... latter having too blue a cast, as this renders them unharmonious, when contrasted with the sky. Represent water by shades of a blue grey: the sky should be a serene blue, with much closeness, and mingled with clouds composed of varying tints of a white and a yellow drab. If mountains are seen in the distance, they should be of a grey lavender tint, and some living animal should, in nearly all cases, be introduced. The presence of a cow, sheep, &c., gives life and animation ...
— The Ladies' Work-Table Book • Anonymous
... would have rendered gloves unnecessary in the coldest weather, while the collar was so high that it pushed his hair up on end on the top of his head. His bright buttons, too, were of the largest size. Rendered complete by drab pantaloons and a buff waistcoat, I thought Mr. Barkis a ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... it did not seem to concern him much, and very probably he had long since come to the sage and sensible conclusion that a man's religion is one thing, and this practical world quite another. This world pays dividends. Rising from a little cabin-boy in short clothes of the drabbest drab, to a harpooneer in a broad shad-bellied waistcoat; from that becoming boat-header, chief-mate, and captain, and finally a ship owner; Bildad, as I hinted before, had concluded his adventurous career by wholly ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and the electric signs ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly—a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners of the low dark cafe solitary persons with hook-nosed, ruminative ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... crowd of girls, all decorated with wreaths and garlands, and wearing almost the same dress that we had seen at Tahiti—a coloured, long-sleeved, loose gown reaching to the feet. The natives here appear to affect duller colours than those we have lately been accustomed to—lilac, drab, brown, and other dark prints being the favourite tints. Whenever I stopped to look at a view, one of the girls would come behind me and throw a lei of flowers over my head, fasten it round my neck, and then ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams
... a good job, too," said Mrs. Spires, whose temper for the moment outsped her discretion. Was this penniless drab doing it on purpose to annoy her? A nice one indeed to high-and-mighty it over her. She would show her in mighty quick time she had come to the wrong shop. Just as Mrs. Spires was about to speak out she noticed ...
— Esther Waters • George Moore
... makes man a thrall, I charm thee from each, And I charm thee from all. Thy freedom's complete As a Blade of the Huff, To be cheated and cheat, To be cuff'd and to cuff; To stride, swear, and swagger, To drink till you stagger, To stare and to stab, And to brandish your dagger In the cause of your drab; To walk wool-ward in winter, Drink brandy, and smoke, And go fresco in summer For want of a cloak; To eke out your living By the wag of your elbow, By fulham and gourd, And by baring of bilboe; To live by your shifts, And to swear by your honour, ...
— The Fortunes of Nigel • Sir Walter Scott
... damnable to offend in, see that you offend not in the greatest. For Christ thought, if he might bring you from the smallest manner of faults, and give you warning to avoid the least, he reckoned you would not offend in the greatest and worst, as to call your neighbour thief, whoreson, whore, drab, and so forth, into more blasphemous names; which offences must needs have punishment in hell, considering how that Christ hath appointed these three small faults to have three degrees of punishment in hell, as appeareth by these ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... were better likened to a butterfly, with its wings closed, and only the more or less drab outside showing. The veldt, somewhat uniform and colourless, with its surrounding hills, is the butterfly with its wings closed. Enter the wide hole in the ground, beside the hidden lake, and descend the rough ...
— The Rhodesian • Gertrude Page
... thought I should like to probe this personal light myself, and by inquiring of one or two of the members of the body, learn what they thought of the matter. I was half inclined to array myself in drab, and tutoyer the first of the body I chanced to encounter in my walks abroad. But then it occurred to me how very seldom one did meet a Quaker nowadays except in the "month of Maying." I actually had to cast about for some time before I could select from ...
— Mystic London: - or, Phases of occult life in the metropolis • Charles Maurice Davies
... deserted, lonely, as though nor man nor beast had ever trodden it. It lay very near the house and I did not know it from up here; it looked now like a long strip of drab linen, which lay bleaching in a boundless meadow. And that again suited my loneliness so well! At last, I looked and saw nothing ...
— The Path of Life • Stijn Streuvels
... clever brush to the welcome of a wider world, without a word or a thought of thanks for the creature who had worshipped and waited upon him hand and foot; and then I saw her life from day to day unroll its long monotonous folds, all in the same pattern, all drab duty and joyless ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... afternoon, muttering over their guide-books, when nothing is needed on this spot but the imagination; and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down sadly upon the living. Through the yellow panes at the back of the high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue was as ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... fellow roomers. A strange, drab lot he thought them from the occasional glimpses he had had in passings upon the dark stairway and in the gloomy halls. They appeared to be quiet, inoffensive sort of folk, occupied entirely with ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... every shop on both sides of the street invited him—the whole street at this sordid end of it was trying to help him. For a very few shillings he bought just the garments that he had imagined—loose and big made of drab canvas or drill, the suit of overalls that had been worn by some kind of mechanic, with two vast inside pockets to the jacket, in which the wearer had carried tools, food, and his bottle of drink. Dale also bought ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... narrow at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction that others also had their ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... proved to be the taller, one the plumper, and one decidedly the younger of the three; then, although they were dressed so exactly alike,—according to what be, I suspect, a sumptuary law in England—and although their stout travelling-dresses, drab cloaks, thick boots, the shaggy shawls severally carried by each on one arm, the faded blue cravats tied round their throats, were so precisely alike and had been subjected to so exactly the same amount of wear that ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 16, No. 93, July, 1865 • Various
... Such as it was I feel again its majesty on those occasions on which I dragged—if I must here once more speak for myself only—after Albany cousins through its courts of edification: I remember being very tired and cold and hungry there, in a little light drab and very glossy or shiny "talma" breasted with rather troublesome buttonhole-embroideries; though concomitantly conscious that I was somehow in Europe, since everything about me had been "brought over," which ought to have been consoling, and seems in fact ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James
... window he saw that Earth was now a huge gray ball beneath them, white cloud-oceans obscuring the drab details of its surface here and there. "—31—32—" The plane was climbing more slowly, and at a lesser angle. Even the X-type had to struggle to rise in the attenuated air now about them. Only the super-light, super-powered plane could ever have reached ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, August 1930 • Various
... warning sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which he lay, ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... you in the crowd for one who was off the color of the common Gorgios,—or, as the Yahudi say, the Goyim. No, I carn't rakker, or none to speak of, and noways as deep as you, though I was born in a tent on Battersea Common and grew up a fly fakir. What's the drab made of that I sell in these bottles? Why, the old fake, of course,—you needn't say you don't know that. Italic good English. Yes, I know I do. A fakir is bothered out of his life and chaffed out of half ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... treasures of the toilet; a writing-table to match served for inditing love-letters on scented paper; the bed, with antique draperies, could not fail to suggest thoughts of love by its soft hangings of elegant muslin; the window-curtains, of drab silk with green fringe, were always half drawn to subdue the light; a bronze clock represented Love crowning Psyche; and a carpet of Gothic design on a red ground set off the other accessories of this delightful retreat. There ...
— A Second Home • Honore de Balzac
... emaciated, slatternly and filthy; and all, young and old alike, clad in threadbare garments that had been mended, patched and turned inside out until there wasn't a square inch that had been left untouched. The green, olive-coloured cloaks and the drab city garb jostled against the red and yellow short skirts of ...
— The Quest • Pio Baroja
... threw them upon the bank, and then wrathfully strode out myself, and tried to shake myself as I have seen a Newfoundland dog do. The shake was not a success—it caused my trouser-leg to flap dismally about my ankles, and sent the streams of loathsome ooze trickling down into my shoes. My hat, of drab felt, had fallen off by the brookside, and been plentifully spattered as I got out. I looked at my youngest ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... crystallized by contact with the plutonics. The formation mostly stands up either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured by manganese. The greater part of the old city was built of this alabaster-like[EN34] ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... like volcanoes; the laugh of the most kind-hearted of children; the stride, the attitude, with her hands for ever behind the back, of an unceremonious man; a young woman already accounted a genius, and felt to be a moral force. Next to her a snub, drab-coloured Livonian, with northern eyes telling of future mysticism, that Mme. de Kruedener, as yet noted only for the droll contrast of her enthusiasm for St. Pierre and the simplicity of nature with her quarterly bills of twenty thousand ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... wait," I said, and we were admitted sulkily to a room, of which the conspicuous features were a malodorous lamp, and a brandy- bottle. I had taken the old drab for a landlady rather the worse for liquor, but, more amiably, she remarked now: "It's a pity Jeanne ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... led the way was cold, drab, repellent to the general gay sense of the summer morning. Spargo shivered involuntarily as he entered it and took a first glance around. But the young barrister showed no sign of feeling or concern; he looked quickly about ...
— The Middle Temple Murder • J.S. Fletcher
... moccasined squaws; Northern speculators and Eastern philosophers; English, Irish, German, Scotch, Danes; Santa Fe traders in striped blankets, and Broadway bucks in cravats of cloth of gold; fine-looking Kentucky boatmen, and Japanese-looking Mississippi cotton-planters; Quakers in full drab, and United States soldiers in full regimentals; slaves, black, mulatto, quadroon; modish young Spanish Creoles, and old-fashioned French Jews; Mormons and Papists Dives and Lazarus; jesters and mourners, teetotalers ...
— The Confidence-Man • Herman Melville
... and you stay awhile, and you find that the woman you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab. And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman beside you is pastier nor dough, and the man of the public house is no more nor a ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... /n./ A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab 'uniform' ...
— The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0
... libertine. adulteress, advoutress[obs3], courtesan, prostitute, strumpet, harlot, whore, punk, fille de joie[Fr]; woman, woman of the town; streetwalker, Cyprian, miss, piece[Fr]; frail sisterhood; demirep, wench, trollop, trull[obs3], baggage, hussy, drab, bitch, jade, skit, rig, quean[obs3], mopsy[obs3], slut, minx, harridan; unfortunate, unfortunate female, unfortunate woman; woman of easy virtue &c. (unchaste) 961; wanton, fornicatress[obs3]; Jezebel, Messalina, Delilah, Thais, Phryne, Aspasia[obs3], Lais, lorette[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... have sat with me before upon the green settee are familiar with the upper shelf, with the tattered Macaulay, the dapper Gibbon, the drab Boswell, the olive-green Scott, the pied Borrow, and all the goodly company who rub shoulders yonder. By the way, how one wishes that one's dear friends would only be friends also with each other. Why should Borrow snarl so churlishly at Scott? One would ...
— Through the Magic Door • Arthur Conan Doyle
... told the stranger, who proved to be Colonel Meade, once of Washington's staff, that the General was abroad on the estate and pointed out what direction to take to come upon him. "You will meet, sir, with an old gentleman riding alone in plain drab clothes, a broad-brimmed white hat, a hickory switch in his hand, and carrying an umbrella with a long staff, which is attached to his saddle-bow—that person, ...
— George Washington: Farmer • Paul Leland Haworth
... wrought lintels of the massive marble front, and exclaimed: "Upon my soul, gentlemen, it is so grand I begin to fear I shall not be comfortable in it." He had scarcely concluded this sentence, when a distinguished politician, habited in soiled drab trousers and a shabby brown dress coat, and a badly collapsed hat, which he wore well down over his eyes, rushed eagerly out, and was followed by a mellow faced policeman, with a green patch over his ...
— The Life and Adventures of Maj. Roger Sherman Potter • "Pheleg Van Trusedale"
... must admit, a drab and dreary crowd to look at, these Germans at the theatre, at the opera, in the concert halls. They do not dress, or if they are women undress, for their music as do we; their music dresses for them. They come, most of them, in the clothes that ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... catch of her breath Flame dashed to the window, and swung the sash upward! Where once had breathed the drab, dusty smell of frozen grass and mud quickened suddenly a curious metallic dampness like the smell ...
— Peace on Earth, Good-will to Dogs • Eleanor Hallowell Abbott
... put on the brightly coloured gowns, beribboned, and ruffled, and gaily trimmed, which she had worn as a girl; and as soon as she was able she carefully folded and put them away in lavender, like relics of the dead. For herself, she dressed henceforth in drab or black. ...
— Miss Ludington's Sister • Edward Bellamy
... regard to none of them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on Wednesday or Thursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their rooms, but neither of these were at home. Late in the afternoon I reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight of them; the other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... fall her drab cloak, stood with arms outstretched in the crater land. Her sparkling robe sheathed her in glory and she sang softly, rapt in her own delight. Then Dandtan put his arm about her; she clung to him, staring about as might ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... he desired it to give. He was a creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... dignified, looked familiar to me. When the marchioness told me it was Mr. Monroe, I wondered that I had not recognized him at once, for he was a familiar figure on our streets during the ten years when Philadelphia was the capital. Moreover, I could have vowed he was wearing the same sad-colored drab clothes he used to appear in then, so entirely unchanged were both cut and color. I looked at him now with great interest, for was he not to decide the fortunes of the West?—in which I could have taken no greater interest had ...
— The Rose of Old St. Louis • Mary Dillon
... the Birmingham Fire Office had two engines, very handsome specimens of the article too, being profusely decorated with wooden battle axes, iron scroll-work, &c. One of these engines was painted in many colours; but the other a plain drab, the latter it was laughingly said, being kept for the Society of Friends, the former for society at large. The first time a "portable" or hand engine was used here was on the occurrence of a fire in a tobacconist's shop in Cheapside Oct. 29, 1850. The steam fire engine ...
— Showell's Dictionary of Birmingham - A History And Guide Arranged Alphabetically • Thomas T. Harman and Walter Showell
... show to another. Tuesday was Viceroy's Cup Day at the races, a very pretty sight. One side of the ground was crowded by pretty women in lovely gowns, and on the other side the natives sat in their hundreds and chattered, not the drab-coloured crowd we produce, but gay and striking ...
— Olivia in India • O. Douglas
... that Miss Dunham noted how Gilbert used to make a mysterious sign in the air as he lit his cigar. That sign, says Dorothy, was the sign of the cross. Long ago he had written of human life as something not grey and drab but shot through with strong and even violent colours that took the pattern of the Cross. He saw the Cross signed by God on the trees as their branches spread to right and left: he saw it signed ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... pretty sight. There was an artist's perception in Jeff in spite of his drab years of EI patrol duty; the white puff of sail on dark-green sea, gliding across calm water banded with lighter and darker striae where submerged shoals lay, struck something responsive in him. The comparison it forced between Calaxia ...
— Traders Risk • Roger Dee
... to twenty inches in length, eight or ten inches in diameter, and weighing from fifteen to twenty pounds and upwards; skin thin, easily pierced or broken, of an ash-gray color, spotted, and marked with light drab and nankeen-brown,—the furrows dividing the ribs light drab; stem small; flesh deep orange-yellow, of medium thickness; seeds pure white, broader in proportion to their length than those of ...
— The Field and Garden Vegetables of America • Fearing Burr
... a new vision of her. I saw her no longer as the deluder of Aunt Jane, but as herself the deluded. Her belief in the treasure was an obsession. This map was her talisman, her way of escape from an existence which had been drab and ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... fish had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... that things were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the reason for ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... she failed of justice to herself, but her eyes were sparkling. She knew that hereabout in this rude world of hers her people were accounted both godly and worthy of respect, but after all it was a drab and poverty-ridden world with slow and torpid pulses of being. Here, she found, in indisputable proof, the record of her "fore-parents". Once they, too, had been ladies and gentlemen familiar with elegant ways and circumstances ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... of that cloudy sky grew clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven. One felt one might at last find something lighter than light. In the fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their colours again: the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another, and his brown feathers were brushed ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... damp insidiousness Creeps into the night; A drab numbness sets in Dripping in lugubrious drops From the haggard fingers ...
— Sandhya - Songs of Twilight • Dhan Gopal Mukerji
... prolonged; for cigars are not supposed to interfere with the proper appreciation of Madeira, and the revelers here cherish the honest old English custom of chanting over their liquor. Closing my eyes now, so as to shut out the dingy drab walls of this my prison-chamber, I can call up one of those cheery scenes quite distinctly: I can hear the "Chief's" voice close at my ear, trolling forth the traditional West Point ditty of "Benny Havens," or the rude sea-ballad, ...
— Border and Bastille • George A. Lawrence
... which regulated their behaviour at table was doubtless, "First come, first served." Forthwith each bill was busy, and the scene became animated in the extreme. There must have been great difficulty to the most accomplished of the carrion in stripping the Quaker of his drab. The broad-brim had probably escaped with the first intention, and after going before the wind half across the unfrozen Tarn, capsized, filled, and sunk. Picture to yourself so many devils, all in glossy ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the way of mortality), but I had arrived at near my present growth of six feet, and with my hair in buckle, a handsome lace jabot and wristbands to my shirt, and a red plush waistcoat, barred with gold, looked the gentleman I was born. I wore my drab coat with plate buttons, that was grown too small for me, and quite agreed with Captain Fitzsimons that I must pay a visit to his tailor, in order to procure myself a ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... most precious dreams had just melted into drab reality—his mother was compelled to go ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... aristocratic region where I was taking my walk, the encounter of an elderly gentleman and lady who bowed to each other on the pavement before me, and then went and came their several ways. In him I saw that his distinction was passive and resided largely in his drab spats, but hers I beheld active, positive, as she marched my way with the tall cane that helped her steps, herself tall in proportion, with a head, ashen gray, held high, and a straight well-fitted figure dressed in such keeping that there was ...
— London Films • W.D. Howells
... Atlantic States, or at least the native rat of our country which have no hair on their tail. this Specis we found on the Missouri as far up it as the woody country extended. it is as large as the Common European house rat or reather larger is of a lighter Colour bordering more on the lead or drab colour, the hair longer; and the female has only four tits which are placed far back near the hinder legs. this rat I have Seen in the Southern parts of the State of Kentucky & west of ...
— The Journals of Lewis and Clark • Meriwether Lewis et al
... he told her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned, swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like a small drab-coloured city chameleon. ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... Convent, known now as Military Hospital Number One, was row after row of Khaki men in bed. They had overflowed to the stone floor down the long corridors, hundreds of yards of length, and every foot close packed, like fish in a tin, with helpless outstretched men. The grey stones and the drab suits on the bundles of straw,—what a backwash from the tides of slaughter. If a man stood on his feet, he had to reach for a cane. There were no whole men there, except the busy stretcher-bearers bringing in new tenants ...
— Young Hilda at the Wars • Arthur Gleason
... indulged in four horses. The varieties of the jackets of our post-boys, blue or yellow, as supposed to indicate the politics of their inns, were interesting to us, as everything was interesting then. Otherwise their equipment was exactly alike— neat drab corduroy breeches and top-boots, and hats usually white, and they were all boys, though the red faces and grizzled hair of some looked as if they had faced the weather for ...
— Chantry House • Charlotte M. Yonge
... the Danube and its junction with the Save, is a really charming park known as the Slopes of Dreaming, where, on fine evenings, almost the entire population of the capital appears to be promenading, the rather drab appearance of an urban crowd being brightened by the gaily embroidered costumes of the peasants and the silver-trimmed uniforms of the ...
— The New Frontiers of Freedom from the Alps to the AEgean • Edward Alexander Powell
... regime of Austria would style himself Count von Potts and Kettlehausen is now called plain Mr. Potts. Other titles, those that have been won by individual achievement and cannot be inherited, still remain in use to brighten our drab existence. Most common amongst these is "Doctor"; you may be a doctor of any or many more or less exact sciences; Professor seems to come next in quantity; again you may profess anything you like. This title is run rather close by Rad, or so it sounds at least, which seems to be the old German ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... was covered with looking-glass, and matched another narrow mirror in shape and size. This door led into a very long room, as plain and even sordid as the drawing-room was inviting: the unpapered walls were a cold drab, and wanted washing; there was a thick cobweb up in one corner, and from the ceiling hung the tail of another, which the housemaid's broom had scotched not killed: that side of the room they entered by was all books. The servant said, "Stay ...
— Hard Cash • Charles Reade
... party was unusual in walking; glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias and landaus that rolled past. Even the convalescent British soldiers facing each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped bullocks, and marked Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-skirts so near the powder of the road. The Sisters in front walked with their heads slightly bent toward one another; they seemed to be consulting. Hilda reflected, looking at them, that they always seemed to ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... evening near the first of September, 1918, a Canadian Pacific train rumbled into Vancouver over tracks flanked on one side by wharves and on the other by rows of drab warehouses. It rolled, bell clanging imperiously, with decreasing momentum until it came to a shuddering halt beside the depot that rises like a great, brown mausoleum at the foot of a hill on which the city sits looking on the ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... stood by the edge of it among tall stalks of red valerian and a great plant of periwinkle which hung down over the wall. And there came along the road a tall man with grizzled hair, dressed in drab breeches and gaiters just like any other man, but wearing on his head a flat blue cap, widening out from brim to crown, with a yellow band round the forehead—the watering cap of a Light Dragoon. He walked very erect, though he limped slightly with ...
— The Drummer's Coat • J. W. Fortescue
... stairs together and out into the crush of people, some of the women in evening dress, but few of the men. The many uniforms looked better, Peter thought, despite the drab khaki. They had to stand for awhile while a taxi was found, Julie laughing and chatting vivaciously. She had a wrap for her shoulders that she had bought in Port Said, set with small metallic points, and it sparkled about her in the blaze ...
— Simon Called Peter • Robert Keable
... shallow twisting ditches between piles of loose earth and rotting bodies. Parts were covered in as bomb-proof shelters, and in places sloping shafts led steeply down to mine galleries before the enemy's front line. Between those two series of drab mounds of earth which marked the opposing lines, lay as terrible an acre as ever was. The hasty burying during the armistice three months ago had been inadequate, and the saps had cut through many of the hastily-scratched graves. Since then many ...
— The Tale of a Trooper • Clutha N. Mackenzie
... on the edge of what passes for a bed. It is made of loosely woven strips of steel, and there is no mattress, only an extra blanket of thin olive-drab. It isn't comfortable; but of course they expect to ...
— Pythias • Frederik Pohl
... possesses a truly noble aspect, and the visitor could not select a better place to begin his tour of the city. Due to the monotonous regularity of the streets and the all-pervading soft coal smoke, Chicago presents on the whole a somewhat drab appearance, but the view from Grant Park or from the lake front (with Michigan Ave. in the foreground) is nearly, if not quite, as fine as anything N.Y. has to offer. In Michigan Ave. are the Public Library (with a beautiful ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... over the Hoboken hills. And there are parks and squares of almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... pieces of work in the book. How admirable is the description; "a tall, thin man with a sandy-coloured head, inclined to baldness, and a face in which solemn importance was blended with a look of unfathomable profundity. He was dressed in a long, brown surtout, with a black cloth waistcoat and drab trousers. A double eye-glass dangled at his waistcoat, and on his head he wore a very low-crowned hat with a broad rim." Every touch is delightful—although all is literal the literalness is all humour. As when Pott, to recreate his guest, Mr. Pickwick, ...
— Pickwickian Studies • Percy Fitzgerald
... widely soe'er you have strayed from the fold, Though your "thee" has grown "you," and your drab blue and gold, To the old friendly speech and the garb's sober form, Like the heart of Argyle to the ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... whole process was gone through to the smallest minutiae, and only an hour after the silvered face of the mirror was deluged with rain-water, and uncle and nephew gazed in triumph at their work, for there was no sign of greyish-drab powder about the mirror, and it was so ...
— The Vast Abyss - The Story of Tom Blount, his Uncles and his Cousin Sam • George Manville Fenn
... of the light also was explained by this time. It shone behind a drab-colored blind, and in shape resembled the stem of a wine-glass, broadening out at the foot—an effect produced by the half-drawn curtains within. I came to a halt, waiting for the next ray of moonlight. At the same moment a rush of wind swept over the chimney-stacks, ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 5, April, 1896 • Various
... have exacted my admittance to the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to be driven ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... rescue. A little ball of black smoke suddenly puffed out behind that sailing bird, and presently a sharp crack of a bursting shrapnel shell came down to our ears. Another puff of smoke, closer, one in front, above, below. They chased round him like swallows. In all the drab hideousness of modern warfare there is nothing so airy, so piquant, so pretty ...
— Antwerp to Gallipoli - A Year of the War on Many Fronts—and Behind Them • Arthur Ruhl
... be said of Mr. Willings that his happy smile always walks in front of him. This smile makes music of his life, it means that once again he has been chosen, in his opinion, as the central figure in romance. No one can well have led a more drab existence, but he will never know it; he will always think of himself, humbly though elatedly, as the chosen of the gods. Of him must it have been originally written that adventures are for the adventurous. He ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... good-humoured carelessness of that most engaging of all eighteenth century malefactors, Deacon Brodie. It is quite otherwise with Charley Peace. There is little enough gay or debonair about him. Compared with Sheppard, Peace is as drab as the surroundings of mid-Victorian crime are drab compared with the picturesqueness ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... law by expulsion from the bar in case of non-payment, and so tenacious of life, that, before departing from the Territory, he solicited and received from Brigham Young a patriarchal blessing; Drummond, as an amorous horse-jockey, who had taken to Utah, as his mistress, a drab from Washington, and seated her beside him once upon the bench of the court; Stiles as himself a Mormon, so far as the possession of two wives could make him one. From the early days of Joseph Smith, his disciples have never minced their language, and they expended ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 3, Issue 17, March, 1859 • Various
... the stooping figure of a man creeping slowly, by the aid of a stick, under the thickly leaved boughs. He was dressed much after the manner of some of our English farmers, with knee breeches, white stockings, and shoes fastened over the instep with a large silver buckle. A short drab coat, and a scarlet felt hat, something like a cardinal's, with large flaps, completed his costume. After a while the man crawled, rather than walked, towards one of the ...
— A Yacht Voyage to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden - 2nd edition • W. A. Ross
... with dollars, it was a city to dwell in and make money in, but hardly a city to live in. The millionaires were building white-marble palaces, taxing the ingenuity and the originality of the native architects, and thus to some extent relieving the general ugliness and drab commonplaceness, while the merchant princes had begun to invade the lower end of the avenue with handsome shops. But in spite of all this, in spite of its pretty girls—and Jefferson insisted that in this one important particular New York had no ...
— The Lion and The Mouse - A Story Of American Life • Charles Klein
... china ornaments, reached for a yard or so up the wall, and then was cut off by the shadow of the reflectors. But in that illuminated space, fronting the children, stood out a panel of plaster, moulded in high relief, overlaid with a wash of drab-coloured paint. The moulding was of a coat-of-arms—a shield surrounded by a foliated pattern, and crossed with the same four diamond device as was tattooed on Miles Arthur's shoulder—this with two antlered stags, collared, with hanging chains ...
— True Tilda • Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... though you are genuinely preoccupied with thoughts of literature, bears certain disturbing resemblances to the drab case of the average person. You do not approach the classics with gusto— anyhow, not with the same gusto as you would approach a new novel by a modern author who had taken your fancy. You never murmured to yourself, ...
— LITERARY TASTE • ARNOLD BENNETT
... horseplay, some is extravagant farce: but it is deep and genuine, it supplied an exigent want, and deserved its welcome. De Morgan says it was like introducing dresses of glaring red and yellow and other crude colors into a country where every one had previously dressed in drab—a great relief, but not art. This is hard measure, however: some of her character-drawing is almost as richly humorous and valid as ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 7 • Various
... drew nearer I perceived he was dressed in clothes as dusty and filthy as my own; he looked, indeed, as though he had been dragged through a culvert. Nearer, I distinguished the green slime of ditches mixing with the pale drab of dried clay and shiny, coaly patches. His black hair fell over his eyes, and his face was dark and dirty and sunken, so that at first I did not recognise him. There was a red cut across the lower ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... large (see measurements); general tone of upper parts drab; sides Ochraceous Buff (capitalized terms are of Ridgway, Color Standards and Color Nomenclature, Washington, D. C., 1912); lateral stripes Fuscus Black washed with Ochraceous Tawny; ventral side of tail near (14' h) Ochraceous ...
— A New Chipmunk (Genus Eutamias) from the Black Hills • John A. White
... what," said Jack, who was lying face downwards with my picture spread before him, "I believe that any one who knew the dodges, when he saw that everything looked one pale, yellowish, brownish tint with the glare of the sun, would have boldly taken a weak wash of all the drab-looking colours in his box right over everything, picked out a few stones in his foreground wall, dodged in a few shadows and so on, and made a clever sketch of it. And the same with Eleanor's. If he had got his birch-trees half as good as ...
— Six to Sixteen - A Story for Girls • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... air, and minding his own business. Not a single squash-vine could be detected tickling another squash-vine; each watermelon lay in the middle of his hill with a solemn expression on his large face; the tomatoes looked ashamed of being red; and only a suit of drab apiece seemed wanting, to make the pumpkins as respectably grave as the other members of the community. Two small boys, in wide-brimmed hats and legs of discreet tint, were weeding these decorous vegetables. They raised their heads and took one good stare as the big wagon ...
— Eyebright - A Story • Susan Coolidge
... Town Hall, however, but in the Casino the Congress meets, and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance, are debated the tragic issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform, over which rise the heads and ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... spangles were gay enough. Booths, roundabouts, Amazon queens, and the rest are the only chance of colour the English people have, and no wonder they love them. But in themselves and in mass the crowds were drab, dingy, and black. Even "ostridges" and "pearlies," that used to break the monotony like the exchange of men's and women's hats, are thought to be declining. America may rival that dulness, but in no other country of Europe, to say nothing ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... Robert looked round the room, but he got no ideas from the faded green curtains, or the drab Venetian blinds, or the worn brown oil-cloth on the floor. Even the new carpet suggested nothing, though its pattern was a very wonderful one, and always seemed as though it were just going to make you think ...
— The Phoenix and the Carpet • E. Nesbit
... waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, completely ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... properly brewed, produces a natural beverage that, for tonic effect, can not be surpassed, even by its rivals, tea and cocoa. Here is a drink that ninety-seven percent of individuals find harmless and wholesome, and without which life would be drab indeed—a pure, safe, and helpful stimulant compounded in nature's own laboratory, and one of ...
— All About Coffee • William H. Ukers
... became quite absorbed in his own reflections. He frequently repeated to himself, or composed perhaps, for a good while, and often smiled or raised his hand, seeming completely occupied and amused. His neighbor, a vastly scientific and rather grave professor, in a smooth drab Benjamin and broad-brimmed beaver, cast many a curious sidelong glance at him, evidently suspecting that all was not right with the upper story, but preserved perfect politeness. The poet was, however, discovered by the captain of the vessel in which we crossed ...
— Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Volume V (of 10) • John Gibson Lockhart
... were of the brown species. Mentioning this to a friend of large experience, he told me that he had known several instances where the eggs of the two kinds had been found laid in the same nest. The eggs are, of course, easily distinguishable, those of the common partridge being of a greenish drab colour, while those of the red-leg are of a dull, cream colour, covered with small brown spots. I have been informed by another authority that the eggs of the red-leg have also been found in the nest of an outlying pheasant. {39} A curious provision of nature, ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... promised indolence and the indulgence of his sentimental tastes. I will do the fellow the justice to say that he was not a hypocrite. He firmly believed both in himself and his ideas,—especially the former. He pushed both hands through the long wisps of his drab-colored hair, and threw his head back until his wide nostrils resembled a double door ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume I. (of X.) • Various
... silent; all faces were fixed on Conger—still in the drab prison uniform. The Speaker ...
— The Skull • Philip K. Dick
... the bottoms with rows of buttons to close them around the ankles when occasion required. There was no vest. Its place was supplied by ample frills of cambric lace, that puffed out over the breast. The chaussure consisted of gaiter-bootees of drab lasting-cloth, tipped with patent leather, and fastened over the front with a silk lace. A broad-brimmed Panama hat completed the dress, and gave the finishing touch to ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... Rhyn or Rein; and gives name to the little place. We heard of the Rein at Ruppin: it is there counted as a kind of river; still more, twenty miles farther down, where it falls into the Havel, on its way to the Elbe. The waters, I think, are drab-colored, not peat-brown: and here, at the source, or outfall from that mesh of lakes, where Reinsberg is, the country seems to be about the best;—sufficient, in picturesqueness and otherwise, to satisfy a ...
— History of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. X. (of XXI.) - Frederick The Great—At Reinsberg—1736-1740 • Thomas Carlyle
... determined. She had now the fine expectation of her youth, her health, her optimism, her ignorance of the world. When these things left her she would perhaps be a yet plainer woman. In her dress she was not clever. Her clothes were ugly with the coarse drab grey of their material and the unskilful workmanship that had created them. And yet there would be some souls who would see in her health, her youth, the kind sympathy of her eyes and mouth, the high nobility of her forehead from which her hair was brushed ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... and drum struck up a lively air and to its strains the feet of Yerba Buena's first invading army kept uncertain step as sailors and marines toiled through the sand. Half a thousand feet above them stood the quaint adobe customs house, its red-tiled roof and drab adobe walls contrasting pleasantly with the surrounding greenery of terraced hills. Below it lay the Plaza with its flagpole, its hitching ...
— Port O' Gold • Louis John Stellman
... room above a baker's shop in the village, and had strewn it about with books and photographs and nick-nacks until the drab surroundings seemed to reflect a little of her dainty personality. Thither, later in the day, she took Betty off to tea and introduced her to a tall fair girl with abundant hair and a gentle, rippling laugh that had in it ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... they could see he was hardly more than a boy, perhaps twenty years of age. His lean, gray body was nearly naked. Around his waist he wore a drab-colored tunic, of a substance they could not identify. His feet and legs were bare. On his chest were strapped a thin stone plate, slightly convex. His thick, wavy, black hair, cut at the base of his neck, hung close about his ears. His head was uncovered. His features were ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... where they touch, then, sweeping like a demi-crescent backwards, they taper to a fine point in a length of about 12 to 14 inches. The male has at times a very strong odour. The female is smaller, and of a reddish-brown or fulvous drab above, with a dark streak down the back, whitish below; the horns ...
— Natural History of the Mammalia of India and Ceylon • Robert A. Sterndale
... the smoke of burning oils,—an atmosphere that is never to be found outside the low walls of a dressing-tent. He experienced a sudden feeling of suffocation. The whole world seemed to have closed in upon him; a drab sky almost touched his head; the horizon seemed to have rushed up to within ten feet of where ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... strong men winced away in fear and loathing. His bony hands, with long, thin fingers which quivered ceaselessly like the antennae of an insect, were toying constantly with the cards and the heap of gold moidores which lay before him. His dress was of some sombre drab material, but, indeed, the men who looked upon that fearsome face had little thought for the costume ...
— The Last Galley Impressions and Tales - Impressions and Tales • Arthur Conan Doyle
... room; the gas jet shed a hideous glare over the place. The room in itself was by no means pretty, for the paper was the worse for wear, and the paint was nearly worn through to the woodwork. The hangings to the windows and to the two little beds were of an ugly drab color; and the view out of these windows only revealed a narrow street. At Kitty's own home she had a bedroom in the Castle end; the paper hung in ribbons, the door was draughty, the bedstead rickety and old; but what a view there was from the windows! ...
— Wild Kitty • L. T. Meade
... he dearly loved this forest country in which he had been born and bred, while he was too keen a sportsman to be unobservant of any aspect of wind and weather, any movement of bird or beast. With the collar of his long drab driving-coat turned up about his ears, and the stem of a well-coloured meerschaum pipe between his teeth, he sat huddled together in the high, swinging gig, with Timothy, the weazel-faced, old groom by his side, while the drama of the opening day unfolded ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... reached in the gathering dusk. Seen under winter conditions the drab little town looked dreary and uninviting enough as the party negotiated its main street. A frame-built hotel, a livery-stable, a small church, a school-house, a line of false-fronted stores, and some three-score dwellings failed to arouse in George an enthusiastic ...
— The Luck of the Mounted - A Tale of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • Ralph S. Kendall
... Apathetic as he had become, he was surprised at her absence. It was either caprice or serious illness. She had dwindled to a skeleton, with a maleficent smile. Her teeth were yellow, her hands become claws, the scarlet of her clothes a drab hue, the plumes on her hat gone. Ambroise wondered. About midnight a mean-looking fellow entered and asked for him. A lady, a very ill lady, was in a coupe at the door. He hurried out. It was Aholibah. Her eyes were ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... row of figures in dark blue uniforms with scarlet facings, drab breeches and heavy riding boots, silent and immovable, with fixed bayonets like so many automatons lining the room all round; at some little distance from the central table and out of the immediate circle of light, a small group composed of five soldiers ...
— The Elusive Pimpernel • Baroness Emmuska Orczy
... reading poetry out of the big Anthology and-this a secret-writing poetry yourself! It was heavenly to write poetry. Something soft and warm seemed to ooze through your being as you sat out there and watched the sorrow of a drab, drab sky; or else, on a bright day, a big shining cloud aloft like some silver-gold fairy palace and, down below, the smell of warm, new-cut grass, and whispers of little live things everywhere! It was then that you felt you'd ...
— Missy • Dana Gatlin
... cloudy sky grew clearer and clearer; chamber within chamber seemed to open in heaven. One felt one might at last find something lighter than light. In the fullness of this silent effulgence all things collected their colours again: the gray trunks turned silver, and the drab gravel gold. One bird fluttered like a loosened leaf from one tree to another, and his brown feathers ...
— Manalive • G. K. Chesterton
... nun, as she walks the convent garden, cannot help asking herself why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker, after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab, cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The consequence of all this has been, that the reforms based ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... 10 o'clock on a clear moonlight night, we steamed away escorted by two T.B.Ds. The Bay was crossed in calm weather. Gibraltar passed on the 30th and Malta reached on the 2nd June. Our clothing, consisting of the ordinary drab khaki, now began to prove ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... main, in remote and God-forsaken regions, in which the only rival entertainment is offered by one-sided political campaigns, third-rate chautauquas and Methodist revivals. When it is imitated in the North, it is always in some drab factory or mining town. Genuine race riots, of course, sometimes occur in the larger cities, but these are always economic in origin, and have nothing to do with lynching, properly so-called. One could not imagine an actual lynching at, say, Atlantic City, ...
— The American Credo - A Contribution Toward the Interpretation of the National Mind • George Jean Nathan
... weights, the multitude of weak, drab-toned stops, have disappeared, and in their place we have stops of more musical character, greater volume, under perfect and wide control; new families of string and orchestral tones; great flexibility, through transference of stops; an instrument of smaller bulk than ...
— The Recent Revolution in Organ Building - Being an Account of Modern Developments • George Laing Miller
... knew of no ideals. The only thing I believed in was the cold, drab theory of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. This could not satisfy a heart that was hungry for enthusiasm and affection, so dreams of family life became my religion. Self-sacrificing devotion to one's family was the only kind of ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... public places, no more tryings of new cafes. Mr. Dosson used to look sometimes as he had looked of old when George Flack "located" them somewhere—as if he expected to see their heated benefactor rush back to them with his drab overcoat flying in the wind; but this appearance usually and rather touchingly subsided. He at any rate missed Gaston because Gaston had this winter so often ordered his dinner for him; and his society was not, to make it up, sought by the count and the marquis, whose mastery of ...
— The Reverberator • Henry James
... light and cheerful, the walls papered with white and gold, and the floor covered with a drab carpet worked with flowers of every hue. Rose worked the carpet herself under the directions of Margaret, who prevailed on her to learn worsted-work for my sake. So there, again, how useful I was! From the ceiling ...
— The Doll and Her Friends - or Memoirs of the Lady Seraphina • Unknown
... see the drab peaks of the mountains which loomed between the partly dismantled trees. Beyond lay the kingdom. Would they ever reach it? There was only one pass; this they dared not make. Yet if they attempted to cross the mountains ...
— The Puppet Crown • Harold MacGrath
... hurried to the gate to watch my departing visitors as they swung down the village street. Weston, lanky and erect, moved with a masterful stride, not unlike the lean and keen-witted setter that flashed to and fro over the road before him. At his side was the girl, a slender body in drab, tossing her hat gayly about at the end of its long string. They passed the store and the mill, and at the bend were lost to my view. They seemed to find themselves such good company! Even Tim, so fine and big, had in this homely, lanky man ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... place is a great disadvantage. The stream was thick with red mud, the condition from which it derived its name, and it swept along with a splendid vigour that betokened a large reserve flood in the high mountains. The marble composing the walls of this canyon for most of its length is of a greyish drab colour often beautifully veined, but it must not be supposed that the walls are the same colour externally, for they are usually a deep red, due to the discoloration of their surface by disintegration of beds above full ...
— The Romance of the Colorado River • Frederick S. Dellenbaugh
... flat, as if the two sides of her face had been pressed firmly together by a strong pair of hands. She wore her hair very flat on her head, which was flat behind; and just at the nape of the neck was a flat drab-tinted knot, of almost the same grayish-yellowish brown as her complexion. On her flat breast was a flat brooch with a braid of pale hair as a background. Even her voice sounded flat in its effort at meekness and self-repression, calculated to appease Mrs. MacDonald ...
— The Heather-Moon • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... said of Mr. Willings that his happy smile always walks in front of him. This smile makes music of his life, it means that once again he has been chosen, in his opinion, as the central figure in romance. No one can well have led a more drab existence, but he will never know it; he will always think of himself, humbly though elatedly, as the chosen of the gods. Of him must it have been originally written that adventures are for the adventurous. He meets them at every street corner. For instance, he assists an old lady off a bus, ...
— Echoes of the War • J. M. Barrie
... went on, peering into the corners of the room. "Look-a-here what Mister Grannis gi' me," and she held out the yellow pitcher. Instantly Miss Baker was in a quiver of confusion. Every word spoken aloud could be perfectly heard in the next room. What a stupid drab was this Maria! Could anything be more trying than ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... came to possess one hundred and twenty pounds in two years. His employers had knowledge of his deeds, and they summoned him to them and said to him that because of the drab shabbiness of his clothes and his dishonest acts they had appointed another ...
— My Neighbors - Stories of the Welsh People • Caradoc Evans
... were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... lovely of him to buy us out? And just think of having both the lamp and the shade for one day's work! Aren't you glad you wore your pink gingham now, even if mother did make you put on flannel underneath? You do look so pretty in pink and red, Rebecca, and so homely in drab and brown!" ...
— Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of coarseness settled upon it by the loafers, the habitual drunkards and the riffraff of the camp, who were not tolerated elsewhere. In short, it did not have that certain indefinable something which gave to The Polka Saloon an almost homelike appearance, but was a drab, squalid, soulless place with nothing to ...
— The Girl of the Golden West • David Belasco
... without notice or remark; for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should: and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open, and disclosed to great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee-breeches. As they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it expedient to look down, and see that the boy was in good order for inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and becoming ...
— Oliver Twist • Charles Dickens
... abruptly. Anthony sat in silence, confused, depressed. The drab visions of train-side Mamaroneck, Larchmont, Rye, Pelham Manor, succeeded each other with intervals of bleak and shoddy wastes posing ineffectually as country. He found himself remembering how on ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... affinity, sympathy or worth, that is the luminary of the moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... streetS Asserts a joyless goal— Re-echoed clang where traffic meets, And drab monotony repeats The hour-encumbered role. Tinsel and glare, twin tawdry shams Outshine the evening star Where puppet-show and printed lie, Victim and trapper and trap, deny Old truths that always are. So fare ye, fare ye well, old roofs! The syren warns the shore, The flowing tide sings ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... base of the cone, a circle of little instruments, resembling sheep-bells, which kept up a continual tinkling to the tune of Betty Martin. But still worse. Suspended by blue ribbons to the end of this fantastic machine, there hung, by way of car, an enormous drab beaver hat, with a brim superlatively broad, and a hemispherical crown with a black band and a silver buckle. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that many citizens of Rotterdam swore to having seen the same hat repeatedly before; and indeed the whole ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... carriages of four wheels, like a break in which horses are exercised. They looked offensively modern, and I wondered why our Army had not got field artillery with fixed ammunition and 8,000 yards range. Some officers and men of the Staats Artillerie, dressed in a drab uniform with blue facings, approached us. The commander, Adjutant Roos—as he introduced himself—made a polite salute. He regretted the unfortunate circumstances of our meeting; he complimented the officers on their defence—of course, ...
— London to Ladysmith via Pretoria • Winston Spencer Churchill
... Italy, when the war against Austria ended. And not youth only, nor Italians only. The British troops loudly and healthily and almost riotously sang also, all the temporary soldiers and nearly all the regulars. Yet here and there were gloom, and drab, wet blankets, trying to make smoulder those raging fires of joy. In a few officers' Messes, especially among the more exalted units, men of forty years and more croaked like ravens over their impending loss of pay and rank, Brigadier Generals who would soon be Colonels again, and Colonels ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... the Siward story suggested the further development of the story in the Hrlfssaga. Olrik says: "I n henseende bar Sivard den digres kamp dog noget eget. De almindelige norrne dragekampe lige fra Sigurds drab p Fvne har stadig til ml at vinde dragens guld. For Sivard digre eksisterer dette motiv ikke; han vil frelse de hjemsgte mennesker. Af alle de islandske dragekampe har kun Bjrn Hitdlekmpes noget tilsvarende, ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... he had saved the bridge could not stimulate him. Mr. Leslie's friendly praise, even his more than cordial hand-grip, seemed meaningless. The world had suddenly turned drab and gray. Her father had stated vaguely that some one was waiting to speak with him in the office. He had hastened in, half hoping to find her—and ...
— Out of the Primitive • Robert Ames Bennet
... coachmen! Yes, indeed, madame—the coachman at the prefecture! I know it for a fact, for he buys his wine of us. And now that it is a question of getting us out of a difficulty she puts on virtuous airs, the drab! For my part, I think this officer has behaved very well. Why, there were three others of us, any one of whom he would undoubtedly have preferred. But no, he contents himself with the girl who is ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... the stranger, as he watched a hawk-eyed extortioner in drab, for these did not condescend to hunting shirts, "drat 'em, ef I had my way I'd wring the neck of every mother's ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... the Chief Inspector was driven westward through the early morning traffic. Fine rain was falling, and the streets presented that curiously drab appearance which only London streets can present in all its dreary perfection. Workers bound Cityward fought for places inside trams and buses. A hundred human comedies and tragedies were to be witnessed upon the highways; but ...
— Dope • Sax Rohmer
... anybody can see that my tuft is dyed, may I be—" When the door was flung open, and a large lady with a curl on her forehead, yellow shawl, a green-velvet bonnet with feathers, half-boots, and a drab gown with tulips and other large exotics painted on it—when, in a word, Mrs. Crump and her daughter ...
— Men's Wives • William Makepeace Thackeray
... her drab cloak, stood with arms outstretched in the crater land. Her sparkling robe sheathed her in glory and she sang softly, rapt in her own delight. Then Dandtan put his arm about her; she clung to him, staring about as might ...
— The People of the Crater • Andrew North
... whispered. "Why you wept in the station, why you invented the story of the actress, why you came here to brighten my drab exile—what this whole comedy of Baldpate Inn amounts to, anyhow? I assure you I am as innocent of understanding it as is the czar of ...
— Seven Keys to Baldpate • Earl Derr Biggers
... Barbed-wire fences, low, olive-drab gate buildings, guidance tower, the magnesium dome of a powerhouse reactor, repair and maintenance shops, personnel-housing area carefully shielded against radiation by a huge stellene bubble, sealed and air-conditioned, with double-doored entrances and exits. Inside ...
— The Planet Strappers • Raymond Zinke Gallun
... he endured this obsession. The day's round was filled with the amazing image of a crowned, hollow-eyed, tattered little drab, the mock and wonder of throngs of witnesses, appreciable only by himself as a pearl of priceless value. The heiress of Morgraunt, the young Countess of Hauterive, La Desirous, La Desiree. Desirable she had been before, but ...
— The Forest Lovers • Maurice Hewlett
... you stay awhile, and you find that the woman you've been thinking of as Queen of Sheba is no more nor a common drab. And the publican you thought of as the grand generous fellow has no more use for you and your bit silver gone. It's a queer thing, but they on land think of nothing but money. And one day you think, and the woman beside you is pastier nor dough, and the man ...
— The Wind Bloweth • Brian Oswald Donn-Byrne
... were like Miss Granger's morning-room. No frivolous mediaevalism here, no dainty upholsterer's work in many-coloured woods, but solid mahogany, relieved by solemn draperies of drab damask, in a style which the wise Sophia called unpretentious. The chief feature in one room was a sewing-machine that looked like a small church organ, and in the other a monster medicine-chest, from the contents ...
— The Lovels of Arden • M. E. Braddon
... river, the stone bridge below him, whose broad gray piers painted perpetual arches on the sluggish, sea-colored water. The smoke from one or two far-off foundries hung just above it, motionless in the gray, in tattered drifts, dyed by the sun, clear drab and violet. A still picture. A bit of Venice, poor Adam thought, who never had been fifty miles out of Wheeling. The quaint American town was his world: he brought the world into it. There were relics of old Indian forts and mounds, the old times and the new. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 11, No. 63, January, 1863 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... had a tall Man's height, or more; No bonnet screen'd her from the heat; A long drab-colour'd Cloak she wore, A Mantle reaching to her feet: What other dress she had I could not know; Only she wore a Cap that was as ...
— Poems In Two Volumes, Vol. 1 • William Wordsworth
... his aspect, but his tread was firm, and his arm still strong enough to steady his long, heavy, double-barrelled rifle. An ample coat of dark blue covered his body; his limbs were enveloped in long buttoned leggings of drab cloth, and a cap of sable surmounted his high, broad forehead. Under this his blueish grey eye glanced with a calm but clear intelligence, and a single look from it satisfied you that you were in the presence of a superior mind. ...
— The Hunters' Feast - Conversations Around the Camp Fire • Mayne Reid
... his messages. For three years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these years must have been for ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... a long drab coat with red facings, was preparing to get off the box of a smart brougham, but before he could reach the pavement, a charming head, covered with a lace cap, was thrust out of the window, and a musical and almost girlish ...
— The Prophet of Berkeley Square • Robert Hichens
... the night Is but a drab inglorious street, Yet there the frost and clean starlight As ...
— Poems of To-Day: an Anthology • Various
... Plaskwith was a short, stout man, in drab-coloured breeches, and gaiters to match; a black coat and waistcoat; he wore a large watch-chain, with a prodigious bunch of seals, alternated by small keys and old-fashioned mourning-rings. His complexion ...
— Night and Morning, Volume 1 • Edward Bulwer Lytton
... in a marine's drab shirt and overalls, stood among a silent group of mechanics on a pier near the Goat Island lighthouse. A few hundred feet out lay a small practice torpedo boat, with the rays of a searchlight from the bridge of the parent ship of the First ...
— Prince or Chauffeur? - A Story of Newport • Lawrence Perry
... yet?" said Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, and there passed between the two women certain regards that Dick would ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... the post. The sun and the leaves made spots come down; I looked close at him through the fence; The post was drab ...
— Under the Tree • Elizabeth Madox Roberts
... C. Sporangium globose, stipitate; the wall a thin pellucid membrane, covered with small scales of lime, from gray or drab to pale umber in color, breaking up at maturity and falling away. Stipe variable in length, concolorous with the sporangium or darker below, tapering upward and entering the sporangium as a short obtusely conical columella. Capillitium ...
— The Myxomycetes of the Miami Valley, Ohio • A. P. Morgan
... disliked seeing the place with no colour or ornament save that which the marsh wind gave it of gold and rust. She would have the eaves and the pipes painted a nice green, such as would show up well at a distance. There was plenty of money, so why should everything be drab? Alce discouraged her as well as he was able—it was the wrong time of year for painting, and the old paint was still quite good. Joanna treated his objections as she had treated his proposal—with good-humoured, almost tender, indifference. ...
— Joanna Godden • Sheila Kaye-Smith
... perfectly formed, and so doubtless were her feet, although these last were hidden by heavy laced-up boots. On the whole, she was an extremely picturesque figure, quite comforting to the artistic eye amidst the drab sameness of latterday civilization. ...
— Red Money • Fergus Hume
... large stages with buildings on them for swimming baths. On one we saw "Swimming School," written in German. A foot regiment passed us with black-and-brass helmets, dark-drab long coats, black belts and scabbards. They had a very sombre appearance, but were fine-looking fellows, evidently ...
— Fred Markham in Russia - The Boy Travellers in the Land of the Czar • W. H. G. Kingston
... to reproduce fact. The word "Truth" has been introduced in the most shameless fashion. It is true that there are men without arms and legs and noses, but to delineate such a creature with exquisite accuracy is not to produce a faithful rendering of life. It is true that there are drab, sordid, expressionless lives, without happiness, without hope, without ideals. To describe these lives in all their miserable detail may be of infinite value for social and reforming purposes. It may be the duty of ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... small cut pieces of very yellow cake with very black currants, sandwiches, made of rather warm thin bread and butter, pink and white cocoanut biscuits, and constant relays of strong dark tea made in a drab china teapot. On crowded afternoons—in fact, every other Thursday—little coffee cups containing lumpy iced coffee were also handed round. When they had music there were lemonade, mustard and ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... everybody had gone to the north, coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty glass that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick brown paper pasted over the windows during the hot months ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... repeated. He was ready for any thing which promised indulgence, and the indulgence of his sentimental tastes. I will do the fellow the justice to say that he was not a hypocrite. He firmly believed both in himself and his ideas—especially the former. He pushed both hands through the long wisps of his drab-colored hair, and threw his head back until his wide nostrils resembled a double ...
— Beauty and The Beast, and Tales From Home • Bayard Taylor
... Madam Drab has made her brags in three or four places, that I said this and that, and writ to her, and did I know not what—but, upon my reputation, she did me wrong—well, well, that was malice—but I know the bottom of it. She was bribed ...
— Love for Love • William Congreve
... would have had him take his choice. My poor father was quite confounded: for my master saw not any he thought too good, and my father none that he thought bad enough. And my good master, at last, (he fixed his eye upon a fine drab, which he thought looked the plainest,) would help him to try the coat and waistcoat on himself; and, indeed, one would not have thought it, because my master is taller, and rather plumper, as I thought but, as I saw afterwards, they fitted ...
— Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded • Samuel Richardson
... at a distance, through the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master forty instead ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... pleaded eloquently for calling in the glamour of the East to illuminate the drab monotony of our Anglo-Saxon surnames. He was quite ready to be known in future as Bantockjee or Bangkok, if the sense of the meeting was in favour of the change—always subject, of course, to the consent of Sir OLIVER LODGE, the Principal ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, April 1, 1914 • Various
... him intimately describe him as eating remarkably little, so that he was not "a great feeder, eating a goose for his dinner, as easily as other men do a partridge." ('A Group of Englishmen,' page 263.) In the matter of dress he was conservative, and wore to the end of his life knee-breeches and drab gaiters, which, however, certainly did not, as Miss Meteyard says, button above the knee—a form of costume chiefly known to us in grenadiers of Queen Anne's day, and in modern ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... point; the edges of the leaf are gently curved, and are of a dark sap green color. The nut is of the form and size of a pigeon's egg, and the kernel completely fills the shell. When fresh it is of a white drab color, but, if long kept, becomes the color of chocolate. The kernel, when new, is nearly all butter, which is extracted in the following manner:—The shell is removed from the kernel, which is also crushed, and then a quantity is put into an earthen pot or pan, placed over the ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... solid ground of actuality and citizenship, and the actuality comes into and colours their poetry no less than their vision. When Mr. Drinkwater looks out of his 'town window' he dreams of the crocus flaming gold in far-off Warwick woods; but he does not repudiate the drab inglorious street nor the tramway ringing and moaning over the cobbles, and they come into his verse. And I find it significant of the whole temper of the new poetry to ordinary life no less than that of ordinary men and women to the new poetry, that he has won a singularly intimate ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... and dirge-like tones. "She" was still wayward and unkind, and "He" was setting out on the morrow in search of treasure to lay at a maiden's feet. The young fellow's visions of the Indies were no longer rosy, but drab as November skies. He was pledged to set his face westward ho! but the zest was gone out of the enterprise. He leaned over a gate, and watched the gulls fishing in ...
— Sea-Dogs All! - A Tale of Forest and Sea • Tom Bevan
... Has most of all, perhaps, estranged our King. I blame you not, I say but what is true. I pray you, then, to waive your own desire, But if it please you otherwise, then speak! What flow'ry fate, what flatt'ring punishment, Is suited to the sin this drab has done? ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VI. • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... but hers was one of those faces that time seems to touch only to brighten and adorn. The snowy lisse crape cap, made after the strait Quaker pattern,—the plain white muslin handkerchief, lying in placid folds across her bosom,—the drab shawl and dress,—showed at once the community to which she belonged. Her face was round and rosy, with a healthful downy softness, suggestive of a ripe peach. Her hair, partially silvered by age, was parted smoothly back from a high placid forehead, on which time had written no inscription, ...
— Uncle Tom's Cabin • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... her grown-up and one of themselves. And she was flushed with the sense of love and power that comes of comradeship. She looked back into the hideous square hall, with its rows of chattering anticipant people, and up to the gallery packed with faces dyed yellowish drab by the near unmitigated gas sunburst, and she smiled brilliantly. All these people were directing their attention and enthusiasm to the same end as herself: would feel no doubt the same tightness of throat as the heroic women came on ...
— The Judge • Rebecca West
... gray mountain massed high about the narrow entrance of Santiago Bay, the picturesque Morro Castle, squatting like a grim giant above the strait, and outside, tossing and bobbing upon the swell of a restless sea, the mighty semicircle of drab ships waiting, yearning for the outcoming of the Dons. We of the "Yankee," I repeat, were in an agony of dread that ...
— A Gunner Aboard the "Yankee" • Russell Doubleday
... all," I said, deciding to feed his stomach before I really tried to convince him. "It all comes under the heading of the drab, routine duties of a housewife. Come on now, ...
— Sorry: Wrong Dimension • Ross Rocklynne
... soiliness^; abomination; leaven; taint, tainture^; fetor &c 401 [Obs.]. decay; putrescence, putrefaction; corruption; mold, must, mildew, dry rot, mucor, rubigo^. slovenry^; slovenliness &c adj.; squalor. dowdy, drab, slut, malkin^, slattern, sloven, slammerkin^, slammock^, slummock^, scrub, draggle-tail, mudlark^, dust-man, sweep; beast. dirt, filth, soil, slop; dust, cobweb, flue; smoke, soot, smudge, smut, grit, grime, raff^; sossle^, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases: Body • Roget
... Words have been chang'd into the quite contrary, in less than three Months Time; and instead of pleasant Jests at Table, Dishes and Trenchers have flown about. The Husband, instead of my dear Soul, has been call'd Blockhead, Toss-Pot, Swill-Tub; and the Wife, Sow, Fool, dirty Drab. ...
— Colloquies of Erasmus, Volume I. • Erasmus
... anything is the matter, except that she doesn't look like the sort of girl who would be an acquaintance of the Pelhams. She doesn't look like their kind, you know. She wears the plainest sort of dresses,—just little straight up and down frocks of brown or drab, or those white cambric things,—they are more like baby-slips than anything; and her hats are just the same,—great flat all-round hats, not a bit of style to them; and she's a girl of fourteen or fifteen ...
— A Flock of Girls and Boys • Nora Perry
... too, that the recent gingerbread and beadwork style of country building was introduced. And these were both, as all new things are apt to be, carried to extremes. Instead of toning down the glare of the white into some quiet, neutral shade, as a straw color; a drab of different hues—always an agreeable and appropriate color for a dwelling, particularly when the door and window casings are dressed with a deeper or lighter shade, as those shades predominate in the main body of the house; or a natural and soft wood color, which ...
— Rural Architecture - Being a Complete Description of Farm Houses, Cottages, and Out Buildings • Lewis Falley Allen
... off, and doubling the others completely back before taking the muskets by the barrels; and then crash, crash, crash, the stocks were splintered off by blows against the largest trees, while the sepoys stood together closely guarded, their faces turning of a horrible drab tint, as their eyes rolled in anxious quest from face to face, for they evidently expected moment by moment to hear the ...
— Gil the Gunner - The Youngest Officer in the East • George Manville Fenn
... about your world to-day: A world to you so drab, so commonplace— The flowers still are blooming by the way, As blossom smiles upon the sternest face. In everv hour is born some thought of love; In every heart is hid ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... which is performed under circumstances such as these, is heroism still. But I want to lay down the principle that such heroism is of a type inferior to that performed under the drab, uninspiring, familiar circumstances of daily life. The soldier who goes marching into battle with the flag before his eyes and wild music in his ears, is a brave man—but the sailor who leaps into the foaming sea, the miner who descends into the flaming pit, the locomotive engineer who dies ...
— Heroes in Peace - The 6th William Penn Lecture, May 9, 1920 • John Haynes Holmes
... into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day of our ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... would dye their hair that color. There would be no more drab browns like mine, or rusty ...
— Molly Brown's Senior Days • Nell Speed
... L300 per annum who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jockey cap, and rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance of the county town, and that only at assize or session time, or to attend an election. ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... already engaged, and when the man went away, the three young people looked at their few possessions in their little home-to-be with varying emotions. Austin was hopeful. He could look away from that which was drab to the brighter side. Just to have the children together with a chance to give them. Christian training was all he could ask. He was willing to ...
— The Hero of Hill House • Mable Hale
... and the same time. Being pretty sure that he recognized his uncle in that venerable figure, Festus came forward stealthily, till he was immediately above the old man's back. The latter was clothed in faded nankeen breeches, speckled stockings, a drab hat, and a coat which had once been light blue, but from exposure as a scarecrow had assumed the complexion and fibre of a dried pudding-cloth. The farmer was, in fact, returning to the hall, which he had left in the morning some time later than his nephew, to seek an ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... blandishing Countess, when Caroline's face was clearer, 'not that my best of Carrys does not look delicious in her shower. Cry, with your hair down, and you would subdue any male creature on two legs. And that reminds me of that most audacious Marquis de Remilla. He saw a dirty drab of a fruit-girl crying in Lisbon streets one day, as he was riding in the carriage of the Duchesse de Col da Rosta, and her husband and duena, and he had a letter for her—the Duchesse. They loved! How deliver the letter? "Save me!" he cried to the ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... followers. On this morning, they attended the celebration of the games in showy apparel, with silk umbrellas held over their heads; and amongst other articles of dress, the principal of them wore an immense drab-coloured quaker's hat of the coarsest quality. So great were their ostentation and pride, that they would scarcely deign to speak ...
— Lander's Travels - The Travels of Richard Lander into the Interior of Africa • Robert Huish
... does seem to be something in what you say—your language may save time and money and grease the wheels of business; but, after all, we are not all business men, nor are we all out after dollars. Just think what a dull, drab uniformity your scheme would lay over the lands like a pall. By the artificial removal of natural barriers you are aiding and abetting the vulgarization of the world. You are doing what in you lies to eliminate the racy, the local, the picturesque. The tongues ...
— International Language - Past, Present and Future: With Specimens of Esperanto and Grammar • Walter J. Clark
... sound deep in the throat. Shann tossed handfuls of sand over the dying fire. He had only time to fling himself face-down, hoping the drab and weathered cloth of his uniform faded into the color of the earth on which he lay, every ...
— Storm Over Warlock • Andre Norton
... Coat for Scout Masters: Made of standard olive drab cotton cloth, two pleats, back and front, with ...
— Boy Scouts Handbook - The First Edition, 1911 • Boy Scouts of America
... the months she spent with the Peabodys, and perhaps the closest, and certainly the most loyal, was Bob Henderson. A year older than Betty, the fourteen year old Bob, whose life at Bramble Farm had been harsh and unlovely and preceded by nothing brighter than a drab existence at the county poor farm, became the champion of the dark-eyed girl who had smiled at him and suggested that because they were both orphans they had a common bond ...
— Betty Gordon at Boarding School - The Treasure of Indian Chasm • Alice Emerson
... leaving Miss Pinkerton's school. The Sedley carriage takes her to Sir Pitt's door. "When the bell was rung a head appeared between the interstices of the dining-room shutters, and the door was opened by a man in drab breeches and gaiters, with a dirty old coat, a foul old neckcloth lashed round his bristly neck, a shining bald head, a leering red face, a pair of twinkling gray eyes, and a mouth ...
— Thackeray • Anthony Trollope
... is there for the Volucella to disguise herself as a wasp? Any fly, whether clad in drab or motley, is admitted to the burrow directly she makes herself useful to the community. The mimicry of the bumblebee fly, which was said to be one of the most conclusive cases, is, after all, a mere childish notion. Patient observation, continually ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... cuckoo." It is in no respect behind any of its neighbours of the grove in conjugal and parental affection, for it builds its nest, hatches its own eggs, and rears its own young, Wilson assures us. It is about a foot in length, clothed in a dark drab suit with a silken greenish gloss. A ruddy cinnamon tints the quill-feathers of the wings; and the tail consists partly of black feathers tipped with white, the two outer ones being of the same tint as the back. The under surface is a pure white. It has a long curved ...
— The Western World - Picturesque Sketches of Nature and Natural History in North - and South America • W.H.G. Kingston
... implied: of love, even as it was understood in Bloomsbury basements, Janie's anaemic little heart suspected very little; but romance was there, fluttering tattered ribbons, luring her on through the drab fog of ...
— A Tall Ship - On Other Naval Occasions • Sir Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... himself Count von Potts and Kettlehausen is now called plain Mr. Potts. Other titles, those that have been won by individual achievement and cannot be inherited, still remain in use to brighten our drab existence. Most common amongst these is "Doctor"; you may be a doctor of any or many more or less exact sciences; Professor seems to come next in quantity; again you may profess anything you like. ...
— From a Terrace in Prague • Lieut.-Col. B. Granville Baker
... wall of the trench, its butt on the firing-step just out of water, the private proceeded painstakingly to examine the person of the prisoner; in course of which process he unbuttoned and threw open the gray overcoat, exposing a shapeless tunic and trousers of shoddy drab stuff. ...
— The False Faces • Vance, Louis Joseph
... thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they ...
— O Pioneers! • Willa Cather
... at the top. Her forehead was the thin edge of the wedge, and she widened slowly as she neared the ground; the first indication of a settlement showing in the lobes of her ears, then in her cheeks, and then in her drab-apparelled person. Her whole aspect gave the impression of a great self-importance, early realised and made part of life, but kept in abeyance by the society of Aunt Mary and by a religious conviction that ...
— Prisoners - Fast Bound In Misery And Iron • Mary Cholmondeley
... watery grey eyes brightened suddenly; Mrs. Ferrari's dull drab-coloured complexion became enlivened by ...
— The Haunted Hotel - A Mystery of Modern Venice • Wilkie Collins
... and to his ardent irreverence even the Christian glories of Middleton seemed unspeakably parochial. In Paris he had danced at night on the Boule Miche out of sheer joy of life, and joined in choruses over midnight bocks; and London itself now seemed drab and joyless, though many a gay circle welcomed the wit and high spirits and even the physical graces of this fortunate young man who seemed to shed a blonde radiance all around him. The factories of Middleton, which had manufactured Sir Asher Aaronsberg, ex-M.P., and ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... them up, a trail of dust ran curling along the ground like smoke. The little party was unusual in walking; glances of uncomprehending pity were cast at them from victorias and landaus that rolled past. Even the convalescent British soldiers facing each other in the clumsy drab cart drawn by humped bullocks, and marked Garrison Dispensary, stared at the black-skirts so near the powder of the road. The Sisters in front walked with their heads slightly bent toward one another; they seemed to be consulting. Hilda reflected, looking at them, that they always seemed to be ...
— The Path of a Star • Mrs. Everard Cotes (AKA Sara Jeannette Duncan)
... swelling and vehement heart Strains the strait-breasted drab of the Quaker apart, And reveals the live Man, still supreme and erect, Underneath the bemummying wrappers of sect; There was ne'er a man born who had more of the swing Of the true lyric bard and all that kind of thing; 880 And his failures arise (though he seem ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... more. Ah! even Mrs. Glegg's day seems far back in the past now, separated from us by changes that widen the years. War and the rumor of war had then died out from the minds of men, and if they were ever thought of by the farmers in drab greatcoats, who shook the grain out of their sample-bags and buzzed over it in the full market-place, it was as a state of things that belonged to a past golden age when prices were high. Surely the time was gone forever when the broad river could ...
— The Mill on the Floss • George Eliot
... it does. Work is mostly always drab—like that. And you see it has grown like a giant. There—there's the giant for your fairy story, my dear. And giants ...
— Red-Robin • Jane Abbott
... into the promised land, had he not been in the land of Midian. If he had stayed forever in the Court of Pharaoh, with its attendant luxuries, life would have taken on a dull, monotonous hue, and his experience would have seemed drab, wearisome ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... in her plain Quaker cap, with the nicely-starched kerchief crossed upon her bosom; Mr. Parlin in his drab dressing-gown, lined with crimson; Mrs. Parlin in a print wrapper, with a linen collar at the throat, her hair as smooth as satin; the three little girls all neatly dressed, and all happy but Dotty. Susy's mocking-bird hung in a cage by one of the windows, and "brother ...
— Dotty Dimple At Home • Sophie May
... the pleasure of her conqueror, doffed her sober drab and appeared in festal array.... The best that the city afforded was at the disposal of the enemy, who seem to have spent their days in feasting and merry-making, while Washington and his army endured all the hardships of the severe winter of 1777-8 upon the bleak ...
— Woman's Life in Colonial Days • Carl Holliday
... atmospheres in which a smoked-glass slide seems to have been slid away from between us and Nature; so that even dark colours on that day look more gorgeous than bright colours on cloudier days. The trampled earth of the river-banks and the peaty stain in the pools did not look drab but glowing umber, and the dark woods astir in the breeze did not look, as usual, dim blue with mere depth of distance, but more like wind-tumbled masses of some vivid violet blossom. This magic clearness and intensity ...
— The Wisdom of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... flowers. Here at thirteen thousand feet, the wind hit us with exceeding force, and soon had us with freezing hands and faces. All about us were bold black and gray peaks, with patches of snow, and above them clouds of white and drab, showing blue sky between. It developed that this grassy summit ascended in a long gradual sweep, from the apex of which stretched a grand expanse, like a plain of gold, down and down, endlessly almost, and then up and up to end under a gray butte, highest ...
— Tales of lonely trails • Zane Grey
... as I had dreamed of it, not the West even of banditry and violent action. It was a desolate, forgotten land, without vegetation save for the dry, crackling grass, without visible tokens of fertility. Drab and gray and empty. Stubborn, resisting land. Heroics wouldn't count for much here. It would take slow, back-breaking labor, and time, and the action of the seasons to make the prairie bloom. People had ...
— Land of the Burnt Thigh • Edith Eudora Kohl
... Catchers' Gloves. Patented, both gloves without seams in palm. Full left-hand back stop glove, made of heaviest Indian-tanned or drab buckskin, the very best that can be produced. The full left-hand glove is extra padded and sole leather finger tips to prevent the low curve balls from breaking or otherwise injuring the fingers. The right-hand glove is made with open back and ...
— Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1889 • edited by Henry Chadwick
... roadway, and the deserted miniature pier of Territet, both dishevelled under melting and mud-stained snow, there lay a patch of water—motionless, inconspicuous, of a faded drab colour—which at some small distance out vaguely ceased to look like water and, yet a little further out, became part and parcel of the dull grey mist. Save for the forlorn masts of a couple of fishing boats, beached under the shelter ...
— The Market-Place • Harold Frederic
... being slightly frosted, his eyebrows bristly, and his whiskers cut back from his cheeks. His face was rather full and flabby, and yet it was not altogether a face without power. A few grog-blossoms marked the neighbourhood of his nose. He flung back his long drab greatcoat, revealing that beneath it he wore a suit of cinder-gray shade throughout, large, heavy seals, of some metal or other that would take a polish, dangling from his fob as his only personal ornament. Shaking ...
— Stories by English Authors: England • Various
... carpet and ink-stained tables. Everything looked well worn and, to a certain extent, dilapidated, yet there was an air of cheerful comfort about the whole which is not often found in rooms of the kind. Mrs Asplin revelled in beautiful colours, and would tolerate no drab and saffron papers in her house; so the walls were covered with a rich soft blue; the cushions on the wicker chairs rang the changes from rose to yellow; a brilliant Japanese screen stood in one corner, and a wire stand ...
— About Peggy Saville • Mrs. G. de Horne Vaizey
... lacking in all the things that season life, but a home which virtue, intelligence, thrift, and courage transform into a garden of roses and a type of heaven. I do not justify neglect of the finer material things of life, nor plead for drab and homespun as passports to the courts of excellence; but I insist that the plainness, simple living, absence of luxury, lack of polish that may be met with in the country, do not necessarily accompany a condition barren of the essentials ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... thought of Lou Macon in her old, drab dress, huddling the poor cloak around her shoulders to keep out the cold, while her father lounged here in luxury. He could gladly have buried his lean fingers in that fat throat. From the first he had had an aversion ...
— Gunman's Reckoning • Max Brand
... had gone to the north, coiled dismally over the fanlike roof of dirty glass that sheltered a blistered front door. Inside, a faint odour of mouldiness hung in the air of the rooms, which had been shut up unoccupied for a long time. The ugly drab curtains in the drawing-room smelled of the moth-powder in which they had been wrapped through the summer heat. The imitation lace drapery underneath them had been torn and not mended. Bits of thick brown paper pasted ...
— The Guests Of Hercules • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... doll that the child fancied! the paint washed off and the golden hair all turned to drab? Could one be sure of "getting used to it," of "liking it better?" And the poor bewildered doll itself! How could one expect to make of it a statue: "The Woman of the People." One could ...
— All Roads Lead to Calvary • Jerome K. Jerome
... quiet enough," said General D'Hubert, looking round at the vine-fields, framed in purple lines, and dominated by the nest of grey and drab walls of a village clustering around the top of a conical hill, so that the blunt church tower seemed but the shape of a crowning rock—"if you think this spot quiet enough, you can speak to him at once. And I beg you, comrades, to ...
— A Set of Six • Joseph Conrad
... Andros. Most of them were kept at Boston, though a few men and officers were sent to the eastern garrison. These regulars were regarded with great jealousy, and denounced as "a crew that began to teach New England to Drab, Drink, Blaspheme, Curse, and Damm." Ibid., ...
— Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV • Francis Parkman
... of their journeying drew to an end, a sudden vision of green, like an emerald dropped on the drab face of the plain, brought a flush to Honor's cheeks, a ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... radiant, holding in her slender throat a key that would unlock the doors of the whole world, and beside her the little boarding-house help, equally young, and with all youth's big demands pent up within her, yet ahead of her only a drab vista of other boarding-houses—some better, some worse, mayhap—but always eating the bread of servitude, her only possible way of escape by means of matrimony ...
— The Splendid Folly • Margaret Pedler
... you offend not in the greatest. For Christ thought, if he might bring you from the smallest manner of faults, and give you warning to avoid the least, he reckoned you would not offend in the greatest and worst, as to call your neighbour thief, whoreson, whore, drab, and so forth, into more blasphemous names; which offences must needs have punishment in hell, considering how that Christ hath appointed these three small faults to have three degrees of punishment in hell, as appeareth by these three terms, judgment, council, and hell-fire. These ...
— Sermons on the Card and Other Discourses • Hugh Latimer
... stage where increase of knowledge often means increase of sorrow. It is, in truth, the sorrow of finding out our limitations which, on their first acquaintance, often seem more appalling than they actually are. While youth may be saved by hope, by what is to be, middle life is often lost in the drab reality of what is. Every youth, who is not as indifferent to his possibilities as though he were nothing more than a lump of flesh, is about to become a numeral in the world. The tragedy enters when he knows himself to be what ...
— Men in the Making • Ambrose Shepherd
... memoirs and histories of the war appeared, some by those who wrote on hearsay, others by men who had taken some part in the campaigns. It was an age of literary dilettantism, when nearly everybody wrote books who knew how to write; and in the drab monotony of Roman supremacy, the triumph over the Jews, which had placed the Flavian house on the throne, was a happy opportunity for ...
— Josephus • Norman Bentwich
... until then forcibly kept down, now get the mastery over him. He gives vent to them in oaths of which he is himself at last ashamed, when he compares himself to 'a very drab, a scullion,' ...
— Shakspere And Montaigne • Jacob Feis
... does she not scream? Why are her eyes fastened—not on her lover—not on the madman, but upon another object? What is that object? Is it a man? Can any man move as that thing moves? Surely that cannot be a man, that streak of drab color—yonder thing that casts to the ground a garment, then shoots backward twenty feet from the abyss—swifter than a panther, as silent as death, with two balls of living fire glaring from—from a face? Surely not a human face! Yes, it is a human face. She does not see ...
— A Strange Discovery • Charles Romyn Dake
... woman, this maid, with good red color in her cheeks, but she wore a dress of heavy woolen material and a cardigan jacket over that. Her thick felt slippers pattered briskly over the stone floor as she went to a clothes-press, carved and beautifully inlaid, took out a drab-colored woolen wrapper trimmed with common red fox fur, and, picking up the tray again, mounted the dais ...
— The Title Market • Emily Post
... after these fish had been placed in the cistern, it became necessary to clean the latter, and the fish were taken out. They were of a dusky drab color when first taken out, but soon regained their vivid tints when placed in a white vessel containing clear water. They had evidently changed color in order to harmonize with the black walls and ...
— The Dawn of Reason - or, Mental Traits in the Lower Animals • James Weir
... Murther's a horrible Sin Of one Handsome without, tho' a Coxcomb within; For not being a Beau, the sad Fate of poor Crab, Tho' himself hang'd for Love, was a Jest to each Drab; Then may Jering live long, And may Risby among The Fair with Jack Barkley, and Culpepper throng: May no Ruffin whose Heart as hard as a Stone is, Kill any of those for a ...
— Wit and Mirth: or Pills to Purge Melancholy, Vol. 5 of 6 • Various
... finished his work was very hot. He had been working hard in the hope of completing the job by nightfall and was wet and grimy with perspiration and dirt. As he carried an armful of stalks to the shock he noticed a boy standing there dressed in a khaki uniform of olive drab. ...
— The Boy Scout Treasure Hunters - The Lost Treasure of Buffalo Hollow • Charles Henry Lerrigo
... replied; "I think it's about business." How well I can recollect Doctor Chowne! A little fierce-looking stoutish man, in drab breeches and top-boots, and a very old-fashioned cocked hat that looked terribly the worse for wear. He used to have a light brown coat and waistcoat, with very large pockets that I always believed to be full of ...
— Devon Boys - A Tale of the North Shore • George Manville Fenn
... was held in the afternoon before the sale, and was voted by all to be a great success. It is a far cry from the days when games were introduced here by the Mission. Then the people's lives were so drab, and they had little idea of the sporting qualities which every Englishman values so highly. In those early days if in a game of football one side kicked a goal, they had to wait till the other had done the same before the game ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... a room full of poor Turks. Picture a crowd of ragged men, some in drab turbans with loose ends hanging down their backs, but most of them in dingy red fez hats, faces unshaved, mottled, ugly—a squat people, very talkative, but terribly mirthless; and in shadowy corners of the low dark cafe solitary persons with hook-nosed, ruminative faces. All about ...
— A Tramp's Sketches • Stephen Graham
... and wondered. He had nothing to do but listen, and watch the man on the bank who led the horse that was towing the barge; or address a rare remark to his solitary companion—an old sailor, dressed in a sou'-wester, blue jersey, and the invariable drab trowsers, tar-besprent, and long boots, of his calling, who steered automatically, facing the meadows in beautiful abstraction. He would have faced an Atlantic gale, ...
— The Heavenly Twins • Madame Sarah Grand
... set off. Mr. Poyser was in his Sunday suit of drab, with a red-and-green waistcoat and a green watch-ribbon having a large cornelian seal attached, pendant like a plumb-line from that promontory where his watch-pocket was situated; a silk handkerchief of a yellow tone round his ...
— Adam Bede • George Eliot
... bottoms with rows of buttons to close them around the ankles when occasion required. There was no vest. Its place was supplied by ample frills of cambric lace, that puffed out over the breast. The chaussure consisted of gaiter-bootees of drab lasting-cloth, tipped with patent leather, and fastened over the front with a silk lace. A broad-brimmed Panama hat completed the dress, and gave the finishing touch to ...
— The Quadroon - Adventures in the Far West • Mayne Reid
... "But the circumstances in which he visited it were somewhat drab. Still, it's not an attractive town, and, as the other way's shorter and the road's about twice ...
— Jonah and Co. • Dornford Yates
... cousins, these Gray boys, were sons with a visible mother and father, and, in being so, appeared to conform to a normal condition, while he was a nephew with an uncle and aunt. Again these fellows were blue-eyed and drab, and, as such, were decent and reasonable, while he was brown-eyed and preposterously fair-haired. To be sure, it was only his oval face that saved him from the horrible indignity of being ...
— Tell England - A Study in a Generation • Ernest Raymond
... hair, hitherto a pale drab smoothly drawn into a braided coil at the back, had undergone a startling metamorphosis. It was Floss's suggestion that Miss Lucinda wash it in "Golden Glow," a preparation guaranteed to restore luster and beauty to faded locks. Miss Lucinda had been ...
— Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories • Alice Hegan Rice
... seldom seen apart; narrow shouldered, short waisted, thin limbed young creatures, they were even at seventeen bowing to a deprecating stoop. Their little faces were alike, short-chinned with pink mouths inclined to be tremulous, the eyes big, blue, and half-frightened in expression, and the drab hair drawn away from the small foreheads so tightly that it looked almost grey. They inevitably reminded one of a pair of blue and white night-moths, scarcely fitted for a daylight world, and continually ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... in front. There was no sign of activity; but two or three untidy loungers leaned against a rude shack with "Pool Room" painted on its dirty windows. All round, the rolling prairie stretched back to the horizon, washed in dingy drab and gray. The prospect was ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... Autumn came with drab, melancholy stubble fields; the bushes in the ravines turned red; the storks hastily left the barns and flew south; in the few woods that remained, the birds were silent, human beings had deserted the fields; only here and there some old German women in blue petticoats were ...
— Selected Polish Tales • Various
... quarters of London, in Holloway, in Kentish Town, in Kilburn and all over South London, all about which life teems and roars but where, along their own pavements, no life is. They are most characteristic of themselves, these streets, when, as often to be seen, there is no soul along them but a sad drab that is an itinerant singer that drifts along wailing, at every few paces shuffling her body in complete turns to scan the windows she has passed and the immediate windows on either hand. She has no home and these ...
— This Freedom • A. S. M. Hutchinson
... at the entrance of the second floor corridor that I struck the first of my desultory supply of matches, and by its light discovered a placard nailed to the wall. The thing was yellow with age and hardly legible. In the drab light of the match I had difficulty in reading it—but, as far as I can remember, the notice ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... had been rather a drab one as seen through other people's eyes, but it had never seemed so to her till within the last few years. Her own father had been the village doctor, but of him she had no memory. Her mother's second marriage to a venerable country lawyer, John Gilman, had brought a kindly, inefficient ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... he looked out upon the cheerless drab roofs of the barracks, with their wisps of pale smoke swirling upward into the leaden sky; counted the dozen gnarled and scrubby trees, as had become a habit with him; rested his eyes upon the black ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood
... wares, rough within, but smooth or burnished surface, self- coloured (drab or brown), or intentionally coloured black (by charred matter in the clay, or by a smoky fire), or red (by a clear fire, sometimes aided by a wash or 'slip' of more ferruginous clay). Sometimes a black ware is ...
— How to Observe in Archaeology • Various
... frequently dissolved. The same woman who was the lady and 'the dearest dread' of her vassals was often little better than a piece of property to her husband. He was master in his own house. So far from being a natural channel for the new kind of love, marriage was rather the drab background against which that love stood out in all the contrast of its new tenderness and delicacy. The situation is indeed a very simple one, and not peculiar to the Middle Ages. Any idealization of sexual love, in a society where marriage ...
— The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry • W. G. Archer
... and the visitor could not select a better place to begin his tour of the city. Due to the monotonous regularity of the streets and the all-pervading soft coal smoke, Chicago presents on the whole a somewhat drab appearance, but the view from Grant Park or from the lake front (with Michigan Ave. in the foreground) is nearly, if not quite, as fine as anything N.Y. has to offer. In Michigan Ave. are the Public Library ...
— The Greatest Highway in the World • Anonymous
... a performance of Lord Lytton's Money at the theatre will supply the farce to this tragedy. "I have rarely seen anything finer than Lord Glossmore, a chorus-singer in bluchers, drab trowsers, and a brown sack; and Dudley Smooth, in somebody else's wig, hindside before. Stout also, in anything he could lay hold of. The waiter at the club had an immense moustache, white trowsers, and a striped ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... or too little. You ask me whether I saw your pearls. When I first spoke to you—a child with all autumn's glory blazing at your back, did I have eyes for trees and skies and landscapes; though they were splendid and profligate in their beauty? No. I saw you—only you! If you had stood against a drab curtain it would have been the same. You were a child, too young to stir an adult heart to love or passion.... What was it then that fixed you from that moment in ...
— Destiny • Charles Neville Buck
... aisle. Dr. Hartwell and Mrs. Lockhart stood near the altar. Mr. Lockhart's indisposition prevented his attendance. Satin, blond, and diamonds were discarded; Pauline was dressed in a gray traveling habit and wore a plain drab traveling bonnet. ...
— Beulah • Augusta J. Evans
... a slender woman, in a drab print dress with no sort of adornment to it or to her scant, tightly knotted hair, stood on the porch impatiently waiting for him. Behind her, leaning in the doorway, was her brother, John Webb, a red-haired, red-faced bachelor, ...
— The Desired Woman • Will N. Harben
... sundered them outwardly, and her instinct, guided by a hundred significant incidents, told her whose hand it had been. She fled to her little gloomy sitting-room, with its worn-out, tasteless furniture and drab walls, and fought her sorrow and despair single-handed and in her own way. She had a man's dislike for tears—though, being a woman, they came all too easily to her—and she fought against them now with all the strength at her command, with all the pluck which in happier days had made her ...
— The Native Born - or, The Rajah's People • I. A. R. Wylie
... that preceded dawn we saw shadowy columns of infantry and artillery and cavalry passing by our camp. The costumes of the different regiments made a break in the drab monotony. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was composed of varied components. Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... precipitated the approach of evening. In the gray twilight, a group of men could be seen standing somewhat apart from the others. All were bareheaded, and all wore rough shirts and breeches of coarse worsted, drab or brown in color, toning in with the ...
— The Nest of the Sparrowhawk • Baroness Orczy
... looked where I pointed, and seeing a man with a gun, gave a startled jump, and pulled up her pony, evidently supposing that we were about to be attacked. "Sha'n't we run?" she began, but then checked herself, as she took in the facts of the drab clothes of the gang and the two armed men in uniform. "They are convicts?" she asked, and when I nodded, she said, "Poor things!" After a pause, she asked, "How long is ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... monotonous. There was a shading of individuality in the girls and newly-wed women, but it faded soon into the dull drab that seemed the only possible wearing-colour of the place. Occasionally, though, the sameness had been relieved by a vivid touch, but only for a short hour. The Fate who snips the threads, had invariably clipped such colouring ...
— Joyce of the North Woods • Harriet T. Comstock
... "would give anything if I could see and put on canvas the lovely colors that you can. I can't see anything but drab, somehow. It must be a somberness of disposition that affects ...
— Molly Brown's Orchard Home • Nell Speed
... durability certainly would have been prodigious; for in thickness, coarseness, and strength, I never saw any cloth in the smallest degree to equal them. His coat was a frock coat, of a yellowish drab colour, with wide sleeves. It is tweeled, milled, and thicker than a carpet. I cut off two of the skirts and brought them with me. His vest was of striped serge, such as I have often seen worn by country people. It was lined and backed with white stuff. The breeches were a sort of striped ...
— The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner • James Hogg
... rocks, grey over-arching sky, relieved only by the soft purple of the sage—a picture of utter loneliness, of intense desolation, which was a horror. The eye found nothing to rest upon—no landmark, no distant tree, no gleam of water, no flash of colour—only that dull monotony of drab, motionless, and with no ...
— The Strange Case of Cavendish • Randall Parrish
... with the broad stripe of the cavalry, and these as they came were flung on the bed by Barker and "Shoe." Then appeared a suit of evening clothes, carefully handled. Then a brown business suit of tweeds, then a light drab overcoat, and then the closet was well nigh empty, and Lanier faced them with the simple ...
— Lanier of the Cavalry - or, A Week's Arrest • Charles King
... gentlewomen, all standing, and all silent, who curtsied to me when I first came in. They were dressed in a kind of uniform: muslin caps bound round their heads with blue ribbons, plain muslin handkerchiefs, lawn aprons, and drab-coloured stuff gowns. They were all gathered together at a little distance from the table, on which were placed a couple of cold chickens, a salad, and a fruit tart. On the dais there was a smaller round table, on which stood a silver jug filled with milk, and a small roll. Near ...
— My Lady Ludlow • Elizabeth Gaskell
... as drab as their houses, as flat as their fields. She couldn't stay here. She would have to wrench loose from this man, ...
— Main Street • Sinclair Lewis
... respectfully at a distance, through the avenue of elms to church, with their small, solemn faces, just now and then slightly nodding to a buttercup and snatching it up; while he, with me and his three-cornered hat on his head, and his gold-headed cane in his hand, and his light drab suit of clothes, all his dress of the same cloth, and his shoes with gold buckles, strode along, while Cato, dressed in some of the Squire's old clothes, walked close behind him like his shadow. You would have thought my master ...
— The Talkative Wig • Eliza Lee Follen
... much like Mr. Pulcifer's. Galusha's trunk had arrived at last, but the garments in it were as drab and old-fashioned and "floppy" as those he wore on his arrival. Horatio was invariably arrayed like a lily of the field—if by that term is meant a tiger lily. Raish generally finished his ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... intoxication or music in their blood, looking wistfully after the civilian's train and its brightly lighted windows as it disappeared behind the trees with a jolly blow of its whistle? Who will obliterate the picture of that exchanging for Death in the drab light of ...
— Men in War • Andreas Latzko
... a straight figure, and was dressed in drab tunic and hose. His dark hair was long and straight, and his face held a dreaming strength, altogether different from the battered visages of the soldiers or the changeless mask of the Inquisitor. The latter regarded the prisoner for a moment, and then lifted one of the parchments ...
— The Man Who Saw the Future • Edmond Hamilton
... eating breakfast; he had it removed, and then fished out his comic opera. But nothing would flow from his pen; he went over to the window, and stood thoughtfully drumming on the panes with it, and gazing at the little drab-coloured street, with its high roof of mist; along which the faded dollar continued to spin imperceptibly. Suddenly he saw Mary Ann turn the corner, and come along towards the house, carrying a big parcel and a paper bag in her ungloved hands. How buoyantly she walked! ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... branches made strange noises all about. They seemed to be shut in by a wall of blackness on every hand, except ahead where, like great streaming eyes of fire, the powerful lamps shot out their rays making weird color effects in the forest—huge tree-trunks loomed a dead drab, like mute sentinels, grim and ominous, that barred their way; now, in the full glare, the foliage took on the softest fairy shade of green; now, tapering off, heavier in color, it merged into impenetrable black; and, with the jouncing of the car, the ...
— The Miracle Man • Frank L. Packard
... down to breakfast early, leaving Dorothy to be served in her room. The hotel was drab and decayed exteriorly; but the dining room was a continental elegance of marble, gilt, and mirrors. Douglas was not stopping here, as I had already learned. I concluded that he would be at one of the better known hotels on the ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... finest modern structures in Manila. Carriages are waiting in the street in front of the hotel, and at the entrance may be seen a group of army officers in khaki uniform, in white and gold, or—very much more modern—olive drab. The dining-room is entered through the rustling bead-work curtain. Here the Chinese waiters, in ...
— The Great White Tribe in Filipinia • Paul T. Gilbert
... here a week without doing that," said Grace, looking about at the scores of olive drab figures. "And in the meantime, they'd think it was very strange we didn't write ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... sympathy or worth, that is the luminary of the moral world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be able to sustain ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... that was so incongruous as to seem artificial. The sleeves of the coat were glossy from much desk rubbing, and its front advertised a rather inattentive behavior at table. The Colonel's dress was completed by drab overgaiters and poorly draped trousers of the same once-delicate hue. Upon his bald head, which was high and peaked, like Sir Walter Scott's, he carried a silk hat in an inferior state of preservation. When he began to drink it was his custom to ...
— The Boss of Little Arcady • Harry Leon Wilson
... brokenly, and Woodville came into view. It was a wretched town in a wretched landscape, far different from the wild hills and the rich plowed grounds around Sour Creek. All that came to life in the brief spring, the long summer had long since burned away to drab yellows and browns. A horrible place to die in, ...
— The Rangeland Avenger • Max Brand
... which had wandered off into a vague mist of feeling, became suddenly riveted to the appalling spectacle of his uncle's marriage. He saw the house in Bolingbroke Street, with the worn drab oilcoth in the hall, and he smelt the smell of stale cooking which floated through the green lattice door at the back. All the sweetness of life, all the beauty, all the decency even, seemed strangled in that smell as if in some malarial air. And in the midst ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... its few dwarf trees and its mangy hedges, lay prostrate under the sky in all the desolation of solitary space, and left the famous restorative air free to build up dilapidated nerves, without an object to hinder its passage at any point of the compass. The lonely drab-colored road that led to the nearest town offered to visitors, taking airings, a view of a low brown object in the distance, said to be the convent in which the Nuns lived, secluded from mortal eyes. At one side of the hotel, ...
— The Evil Genius • Wilkie Collins
... cottage behind that light, a little drab cottage of a half dozen rooms. It stood, unpainted and unkempt, in a wedge-shaped acre of neglected garden which, between high weeds and uncut shrubbery, had long before gone to straggling ruin. And that wedge-shaped acre which cut a deep fissure in the edge of the immaculate ...
— Once to Every Man • Larry Evans
... supper Hugh arrived at the Cooks', and the two boys accompanied by Harold set out. They felt very proud to be walking with a real live soldier, a man in the olive drab uniform of the American Army. Harold carried a rifle, with an ugly looking bayonet affixed to the barrel, the whole thing being nearly ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... to descend from the dignity of the poet and the statesman to the low delights of mean company. His Chloe, probably, was sometimes ideal; but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab[10] of the lowest species. One of his wenches, perhaps Chloe, while he was absent from his house, stole his plate, and ran away; as was related by a woman who had been his servant. Of this propensity to sordid converse ...
— The Works of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. in Nine Volumes - Volume the Eighth: The Lives of the Poets, Volume II • Samuel Johnson
... to assess some poor devil's damages in drachmae! Let us honour, not pity or despise them, for having thought it right to do so, for having deliberately determined to infuse into public affairs, in themselves so drab and dull, so deficient in the fineness and subtlety which characterize men's more intimate concerns, the interest derived from the very fact that honest, sincere, and able minds devoted themselves to their study. As Huxley could make the geological procession of the ages revolve round a piece ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... 25 stitches to a pattern. Six shades each of scarlet, drab, and blue. Cast on 108 stitches. Commence with the darkest blue and ...
— Exercises in Knitting • Cornelia Mee
... shown her was a light grey coat, the exact counterpart of the one worn by the gentleman in the carriage and Uncle William. It was turned inside out, and behold, it became a completely new overcoat of a drab colour, like the one worn by ...
— Little Folks (December 1884) - A Magazine for the Young • Various
... thick about the sand, Aim them, fling them, And, as my idle arm resumes the knack, Score a hit and laugh To see her stumble hurt, behind the pine trunks. "Unless you work, I throw again, To it and steady at it. Mark me, drab, we Camilli Mean what we say." Stone after stone still flies, But aimed to knock chips from the pine-boles now; For she is busy gathering sticks, increasing Her distance as she may. The noon is sultry, Heated and clammy, I, Towards the live waves turning, slip my tunic, ...
— Miscellany of Poetry - 1919 • Various
... of your materials should be selected with due regard to the species of garment and the tone of the complexion. If the face be of that faint drab which your friends would designate pallid, and your enemies sallow, a coat of pea-green or snuff-brown must be scrupulously eschewed, whilst black or invisible green would, by contrast, make that appear delicate and interesting, which, by the use of the former colours, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 1, August 28, 1841 • Various
... Eric met a shambling, old gray horse drawing an express wagon which had seen better days. The driver was a woman: she appeared to be one of those drab-tinted individuals who can never have felt a rosy emotion in all their lives. She stopped her horse, and beckoned Eric over to her with the knobby handle of a ...
— Kilmeny of the Orchard • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... in series with the electrified wire over which the inventor hoped to send his messages. For three years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these years must have been for the experimenters we may well imagine. It requires ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... confessed that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... amongst them. It was not there; but presently she became conscious of some one standing beside her, and on looking up she recognised Black Gard, the Count's confidential man. He was dressed like the fishermen in drab trousers and a dark blue jersey, but wore a blue cloth cap, with the name of the yacht on it, instead of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... as they last. When they go, I suppose I'll have to take to calico, but it will be pretty calico, and pink. Pink calico don't cost a penny more than drab—and there's one thing I positively decline to do, even in a jungle, and ...
— The Romance of a Plain Man • Ellen Glasgow
... worn with a bright green bonnet; red and green, like our friend a-la-macaw; salmon colour and blue; yellow and red; green and blue. Two ill-assorted shades of the same colour, such as a dark and light blue; or a red lilac and a blue lilac; or a rose pink and a blue pink; or drab and yellow. Instances might be multiplied without end of incongruous inharmonious blending of colours, the mere sight of which is enough to give any one a bilious fever. There are colours which, in themselves, may be inoffensive, but of which only particular shades assort well ...
— Routledge's Manual of Etiquette • George Routledge
... Places turn'd, and out of Doors, And made the meanest of your Sons of Whores; The scene of Laughter, and the common chats Of your salt Bitches, and your other Brats; Forc'd to a private Life, to Whore and Drink, On my past Grandeur and my Follies Think: Would I had been the Brat of some mean Drab, Whom Fear or Chance had caus'd to choak or stab, Rather than be the Issue of a King, And by him made so wretched, scorn'd a Thing. How little cause has mankind to be proud Of Noble Birth, the Idol of the Crowd! Have I abroad in Battels Honour won To be at home dishonourably undone? ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... off, vouchsafing no more, and soon left the breakfast-table, to take up the work she had laid out to do. And she accomplished it, though many times her hands dropped idle and her eyes peered out of her window at the drab slides of the ...
— The Mysterious Rider • Zane Grey
... The malignant scarlet fever begins with inflamed tonsils; which are succeeded by dark drab coloured sloughs three or five lines in diameter, flat, or beneath the surrounding surface; and which conceal beneath them spreading gangrenous ulcers. The swellings of the tonsils are sensible to the eye and touch externally, and have an elastic rather ...
— Zoonomia, Vol. II - Or, the Laws of Organic Life • Erasmus Darwin
... would have been a Hercules instead of a long, thin, nervous man, looking too brittle and delicate to be used even for a pipe-cleaner. The narrow oval of his face sloped to a pointed, untrimmed beard. His linen was reproachable, his dingy boots were down at heel, and his cocked hat was drab with dust. Such are the effects of a love ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... wanly, as if it had been a leaden sea. But with the uprising of the sun the familiar glaring white of the alkali blazed out once more. They had left the pinnacled hills and were now traveling over undulating country overgrown with rough brush. It was a sad, drab color, and smelled pungently where the ...
— The Girl Aviators on Golden Wings • Margaret Burnham
... slowly faded into drab. The trees, dripping with moisture, gradually took shape. The day of ...
— The Lure of the Labrador Wild • Dillon Wallace
... Edinboro'," he murmured. "It's better to stay at home, and that's true; but a man must live where his money is made. It is a great pity, but it's always so! Yet I've done very well this year. O yes," he went on with ingenuous enthusiasm. "You see that man with the drab kerseymere coat? I bought largely of him in the autumn when wheat was down, and then afterwards when it rose a little I sold off all I had! It brought only a small profit to me; while the farmers kept theirs, expecting higher figures—yes, though the rats were gnawing the ricks hollow. ...
— The Mayor of Casterbridge • Thomas Hardy
... such is absolutely the rubbish which has been shot from the Chiswick Press. Next—hear it, ye powers of impudence!—Allan Cunningham's beautiful ballad of Lady Anne, makes its appearance as "Lady Nell." We need scarcely add that in such hands the virgin degenerates into a drab. The other remodelments are trash. The "Merchant's Garland" is a new version by Sheldon of a street ditty called the "Factor's Garland," of which we happen to have a copy in a collection of penny histories. It is as much an ancient ballad as the Murder of William Weare—is dear at the ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 61, No. 379, May, 1847 • Various
... faded calico dress that dragged in the back was tied in at the waist with a ragged apron. There was a look of sad resignation in her eyes. Now and then she brushed a hand up the back of her head to catch the drab stray locks. She might have been fifty, judging from the stooped shoulders and weary step. Yet the rounded arms—her sleeves were rolled ...
— Blue Ridge Country • Jean Thomas
... kindless[71] villain! O, vengeance! Why, what an ass am I! This is most brave, That I, the son of a dear father murder'd, Prompted to my revenge by heaven and hell, Must, like a scold, unpack my heart with words, And fall a cursing, like a very drab, A scullion! Fye upon't! fye! About, my brains![72] I have heard That guilty creatures, sitting at a play, Have by the very cunning of the scene Been struck so to the soul, that presently They have proclaim'd their malefactions; For murder, though it have no tongue, ...
— Hamlet • William Shakespeare
... back on the next few years of her life, she could remember nothing of them except the tremendous difference that the children had made. All the rest was blotted out, a drab blur of what Mrs. Fowler described with dignity as "social duties," moving always against the variable atmosphere of the house, which was gay or sombre, light or gloomy, according to the fluctuating ...
— Life and Gabriella - The Story of a Woman's Courage • Ellen Glasgow
... hollow-eyed, untoothed, furrowed on her face, having her limbs trembling with the palsy, going mumbling in the streets; one that hath forgotten her Pater-noster, and yet hath a shrewd tongue to call a drab a drab. If she hath learned of an old wife, in a chimney-end, Pax, Max, Fax, for a spell, or can say Sir John Grantham's curse for the miller's eels, 'All ye that have stolen the miller's eels, Laudate dominum de coelis: and all they that have consented thereto, ...
— Salem Witchcraft, Volumes I and II • Charles Upham
... your world to-day: A world to you so drab, so commonplace— The flowers still are blooming by the way, As blossom smiles upon the sternest face. In everv hour is born some thought of love; In every heart is ...
— The Glugs of Gosh • C. J. Dennis
... for Pies, Damsons, to Preserve, Deafness, Debility, Bitters for, Decanter, to Remove a Stopper from, Diseases, Summer, Domestics, on the Management of, Dough-nuts, Drab, to Color, Drawn Butter, Dressing, or Stuffing, Dried Beef, Dried Beef, to Stew, Dropsy, Ducks, to Roast, Dumplings, Apple, and Peach, Dumplings, Bacon, Dumplings, Corn, Dumplings, Drop, Dumplings, Large, Dumplings, Light Bread, Dumplings, Rice, Dumplings, Stew, Dumplings, ...
— Domestic Cookery, Useful Receipts, and Hints to Young Housekeepers • Elizabeth E. Lea
... second-hand clothes; every shop on both sides of the street invited him—the whole street at this sordid end of it was trying to help him. For a very few shillings he bought just the garments that he had imagined—loose and big made of drab canvas or drill, the suit of overalls that had been worn by some kind of mechanic, with two vast inside pockets to the jacket, in which the wearer had carried tools, food, and his bottle of drink. Dale also bought ...
— The Devil's Garden • W. B. Maxwell
... poultry-yard a shabby little drab-colored hen, very small and very much despised; Cock-alu would not look at her, nor Hen-alie either; she had no tail-feathers at all, and long black legs which looked as if she had borrowed them from a hen twice ...
— Boys and Girls Bookshelf; a Practical Plan of Character Building, Volume I (of 17) - Fun and Thought for Little Folk • Various
... arm of the bench. The muscles of his face scarcely moved, but its sallow tint changed, under his father's eyes, to a sickly drab. ...
— Shining Ferry • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... no doubt. All her rights were not hers even now—no, not by a long way. But oh, how much better was this than the drab and shabby and barren existence for ever left behind! She was bound, indeed; yet she was free—freer than another might have been in her place, and far, far less bound. One must expect to pay some tax to ...
— Sisters • Ada Cambridge
... discretion. A green flat region, made of peat and sand; human industry needing to be always busy on it: raised causeways with incessant bridges, black sedgy ditch on this hand and that; many meres, muddy pools, stagnant or flowing waters everywhere; big muddy Oder, of yellowish-drab color, coming from the south, big black Warta (Warthe) from the Polish fens in the east, the black and yellow refusing to mingle for some miles. Nothing of the picturesque in this country; but a good deal of the ...
— History Of Friedrich II. of Prussia, Vol. VIII. (of XXI.) • Thomas Carlyle
... the harvesters were for the most part residents of the neighborhood, who found accommodation in their own homes. The house was a small frame, oblong building, of the conventional Canadian farm-house order of architecture, painted of a drab color and standing a hundred yards or so from the main road. The barn and stable stood a convenient distance to the rear. About midway between house and barn was a deep well, worked with a windlass and ...
— The Gerrard Street Mystery and Other Weird Tales • John Charles Dent
... wedding or following a funeral. And never, in twenty-two years of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, under darkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle of sidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab domestic tragedy ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... floor. You see nothing of her at Holland House, which Tom may use as his inn, or at Bowood, if she can help herself, which in the country is his house of call. She is the Jenny Wren of this little cock-robin; she wears drab, too often mourning; but you find that she counts for very much with Tom. He loves to know her at his back, loves to remind himself of it. He is always happy to be home again in her faithful arms. Through all ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... are parks and squares of almost constant charm, though it be a charm not of the old world, but the new, of the uprearing steel city of the twentieth century. And finally there are certain hours when kindly Nature takes a hand at coloring our drab mortar piles and softening out distances and making our forests of masonry no less wonderful to look upon than her own forests of timber. Such an hour is the blue twilight, such an hour may be the wet evening when the pavements shine with molten gold and ...
— Penguin Persons & Peppermints • Walter Prichard Eaton
... causeless hatreds rise, And daily where he goes, of late, he spies The scowls of sullen and revengeful eyes; 'Tis what he knows with much contempt to bear, And serves a cause too good to let him fear: He fears no poison from incensed drab, No ruffian's five-foot sword, nor rascal's stab; Nor any other snares of mischief laid, Not a Rose-alley cudgel ambuscade; From any private cause where malice reigns, Or general pique all ...
— The Dramatic Works of John Dryden Vol. I. - With a Life of the Author • Sir Walter Scott
... came to her feet, then to her knees, then to her waist. Each time the dream returned, the tide seemed higher. Once it rose to her neck, once even to her mouth, covering her lips for a moment so that she could not breathe. She did not wake between the dreams; a period of drab and dreamless slumber intervened. But, finally, the water rose above her eyes and face, ...
— The Man Whom the Trees Loved • Algernon Blackwood
... find out how they can be made so. It is not thought necessary to entice them into goodness by the attractions of eloquence, the charm of imagery, or the fascinations of a brilliant wit. These philosophers have a Quaker style, a dress of plain drab, used only for clothing the thought, not ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... double chin, which told tales of nightly good cheer, his cocked hat, military coatee, and terrific paunch, which resisted all attempts to confine it within reasonable military compass; John Bellingham—the murderer of Spencer Perceval,—with his retreating forehead, long pointed nose, drab cloth coat and exuberant shirt frill; "What? What? What?"—Great George himself, as he appeared in 1810, in full military panoply—huge ill-fitting boots, huge blue military coat, collar, lappets, and star, a white-powdered ...
— English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. - How they Illustrated and Interpreted their Times. • Graham Everitt
... best harbor in these parts! But what's this? colors half-mast?" exclaimed the captain, as he caught sight of a little pouch, woven together of bright colored basket stuff, slung over her shoulder; a little drab paw, darting from out its deepest recesses in pursuit of a tantalizing curl, soon explains how matters stand, and a voice of the greatest feline sweetness is heard in reply to divers catlike salutations, proceeding from the ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... Sampson's letter to Rosebud. The heralds of spring, the warm, southern breezes, which brought trailing flights of geese and wild duck winging northward, and turned the pallor of the snow to a dirty drab hue, like a soiled white dress, had already swept across the plains. The sunlight was fiercely blinding. Even the plainsman is wary at this time of the year, for the perils of snow-blindness are as real to ...
— The Watchers of the Plains - A Tale of the Western Prairies • Ridgewell Cullum
... in the yard gate was opened, and a sturdy-looking grey-haired man in snuff-coloured coat and cocked hat, drab breeches and gaiters, entered unseen by the pair, who ...
— The Adventures of Don Lavington - Nolens Volens • George Manville Fenn
... shortsightedness. Lee couldn't pretend to answer all this for women, or even in part for Savina. Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority: the night assumed no resemblance ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... is so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought spent on how to make a perfect time better. The ballroom is the most wonderful ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... sublime but beautiful. The sandstone, reduced by ages to a crumbling marl, was of all colors. There were layers of green, reddish-brown, drab, purple, red, yellow, pinkish, slate, light-brown, orange, white, and banded. Nature, not contented with building enchanted palaces, had frescoed them. At this distance, indeed, the separate tints of the strata could not be discerned, ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... styled the Four-in-Hand Club, and the Barouche Club. According to the Club rules, the barouches were "yellow-bodied, with 'dickies,' the horses bay, with rosettes at their heads, and the harness silver-mounted. The members wore a drab coat reaching to the ankles, with three tiers of pockets, and mother-o'-pearl buttons as large as five-shilling pieces. The waistcoat was blue, with yellow stripes an inch wide; breeches of plush, with strings and rosettes to each knee; and it was de rigueur that the ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Vol. 7. - Poetry • George Gordon Byron
... my imagination had been running in conventional channels and that my hopes had always been drab stuff. I had envisaged a command as a result of a slow course of promotion in the employ of some highly respectable firm. The reward of faithful service. Well, faithful service was all right. One would naturally ...
— The Shadow-Line - A Confession • Joseph Conrad
... next morning by the 7.10 train, and half an hour before that time saw me standing before the Columbus statue in the Piazza Acquaverdi. Weems was such a mighty squeamish little creature about the proprieties that I thought an old dunnage-sack would scandalize him, and so had purchased a drab portmanteau for my kit at the cost of half my remaining capital. I intended to have no more breezes with him if it could ...
— The Recipe for Diamonds • Charles John Cutcliffe Wright Hyne
... might have accommodated fifteen or twenty spectators, it now contained only himself and me and a third person, at whom I threw a glance on entering. He was a neat and trim young man of two or three and twenty; his drab hat and green frock-coat with velvet collar were smart, though no longer new, while a pair of green spectacles that seemed needless to his brisk little eyes gave him something of a scholar-like and literary air. After allowing me a sufficient time ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... the home ranch broke stormy. Gray, leaden skies and low scudding, drab clouds drifted over the foothills and obscured the view of the peaks. A nasty drizzle dampened the face of the world and laid its clammy touch on all living things. This condition prevailed all through the day and shortly ...
— The Settling of the Sage • Hal G. Evarts
... stage that overlooked the chairs Where dozens sat, and where a pop—eyed daub Of Shakespeare, very like the hired man Of Christian Dallman, brow and pointed beard, Upon a drab proscenium outward stared, Sat Harmon Whitney, to that eminence, By merit raised in ribaldry and guile, And to the assembled rebels thus he spake: "Whether to lie supine and let a clique Cold-blooded, ...
— Spoon River Anthology • Edgar Lee Masters
... myself, and tried to shake myself as I have seen a Newfoundland dog do. The shake was not a success—it caused my trouser-leg to flap dismally about my ankles, and sent the streams of loathsome ooze trickling down into my shoes. My hat, of drab felt, had fallen off by the brookside, and been plentifully spattered as I got out. I looked at my youngest nephew ...
— The Wit and Humor of America, Volume IX (of X) • Various
... the imitation. Indeed, she was wonderful at this trick of mimicry, a thing most odious to Friends. As I smiled, hearing her, I was aware of my father in the open doorway of the sitting-room, tall, strong, with much iron-gray hair. Within I saw several Friends, large rosy men in drab, with horn buttons and straight collars, their stout legs clad in dark silk hose, without the paste or silver buckles then in use. All wore broad-brimmed, low beavers, and their gold-headed canes ...
— Hugh Wynne, Free Quaker • S. Weir Mitchell
... almost inaccessible to Wilson's cattle its undergrowth was rank and high, and as it was sheltered from the sun's rays and watered in part by a tiny spring, it was often the one green oasis in a weary land of crackling yellow and drab. ...
— The Gold-Stealers - A Story of Waddy • Edward Dyson
... seriousness. We are a young people, but only in the sense of healthy-mindedness. There is no real taste among us for the erotic or the decadent. It is foreign to us because, as a people, we have not felt the corroding touch of decadence. Nor is life here all drab. Hence I expect lights as well as shadows in every ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... world. Without it there would have been "a huge eclipse of sun and moon;" or at best, as a well-known writer(29) expresses it in reference to another subject, we should have lived in "a silent and drab-coloured creation." We are prepared by the power that made us for feelings and emotions; and, unless these come to diversify and elevate our existence, we should waste our days in melancholy, and scarcely be able to sustain ourselves. The affection we entertain for those towards ...
— Thoughts on Man - His Nature, Productions and Discoveries, Interspersed with - Some Particulars Respecting the Author • William Godwin
... wire over which the inventor hoped to send his messages. For three years they labored with this apparatus, trying every conceivable sort of disk. It is easy to pass over those three years, filled as they were with unceasing toil and patient effort, because they were drab years when little of interest occurred. But these were the years when Bell and Watson were "going to school," learning how to apply electricity to this new use, striving to make their apparatus talk. How dreary and trying these years must have been for the experimenters we may well imagine. ...
— Masters of Space - Morse, Thompson, Bell, Marconi, Carty • Walter Kellogg Towers
... that this did not satisfy Wagner. He did not like to see people eternally damned; drab, hopeless tragedy was not for him. In nearly every opera we find peace and hope at the close, or even ecstasy in death, as in the Dusk of the Gods (Goetterdaemmerung) and Tristan. So he promptly made use of Elisabeth in TANNHAeUSER, ...
— Wagner • John F. Runciman
... had recovered a little from his shock, he went and sniffed curiously at the representative pieces of the fallen projectile. They had a distinctive flavour, oddly reminiscent of the two drab animals of the ledge. He sat up and pawed the larger lump, and walked round it several times, trying to find a ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... a hack and went about my business, and it was in this hack—this immortal, historical hack—that the curious thing I speak of occurred. It was a hack like any other, only a trifle dirtier, with a greasy line along the top of the drab cushions, as if it had been used for a great many Irish funerals. It is possible I took a nap; I had been traveling all night, and though I was excited with my errand, I felt the want of sleep. At all events I woke up suddenly, from a sleep or ...
— The American • Henry James
... certainly as it is told when an English peer finds his way to the divorce court; but nobody expounds to the nations the excellence of the honourable lives which are led by most American millionaires, any more than the world is kept informed of the drab virtue of the majority of the British aristocracy. Wherefore the English people have come to think of American business ethics as being too often of the shadiest; whereas they ought on reflection to be aware that only in most exceptional ...
— The Twentieth Century American - Being a Comparative Study of the Peoples of the Two Great - Anglo-Saxon Nations • H. Perry Robinson
... angry, and that in a grave, quiet manner, because they supplied no fish on Friday; for Barney was a conscientious Catholic. He had likewise strict notions of refinement; and when, late one evening, after the women had retired, a young Scotsman struck up an indecent song, Barney's drab clothes were immediately missing from the group. His taste was for the society of gentlemen, of whom, with the reader's permission, there was no lack in our five steerages and second cabin; and he avoided the rough and positive with a girlish shrinking. Mackay, partly from his superior powers ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 2 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... and in cool undresses, on the pavement outside, enjoying the gratification of the passers-by, with lazy dignity. The family had retired to rest when we went to bed, at midnight; but the hairdresser (a corpulent man, in drab slippers) was still sitting there, with his legs stretched out before him, and evidently couldn't bear to have ...
— Pictures from Italy • Charles Dickens
... own smart gig, drawn by his famous fast-trotting mare. It was his habit to drive himself; and it was one among the trifling external peculiarities in which he and his son differed a little, to affect something of the sporting character in his dress. The drab trousers of Pedgift the elder fitted close to his legs; his boots, in dry weather and wet alike, were equally thick in the sole; his coat pockets overlapped his hips, and his favorite summer cravat was of light spotted muslin, tied in the neatest and smallest of bows. ...
— Armadale • Wilkie Collins
... was a time when, posing as a purist, I thought it fine to criticise and crab CHARLES DICKENS as a crude caricaturist, Who laid his colours on too thick and slab, Who was a sort of sentimental tourist And made life lurid when it should be drab; In short I branded as a brilliant dauber The man who gave ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Sept. 5, 1917 • Various
... light that preceded dawn we saw shadowy columns of infantry and artillery and cavalry passing by our camp. The costumes of the different regiments made a break in the drab monotony. The Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force was composed of varied components. Steel helmets could be worn only in winter. In many of the native regiments the British officers wore tasselled pugrees, and long tunics that were really ...
— War in the Garden of Eden • Kermit Roosevelt
... product of a creed which ignores the aesthetical part of man and reduces Nature to a uniform drab would seem to have been Bernard Barton. His verse certainly infringed none of the superstitions of the sect; for from title-page to colophon, there was no sin either in the way of music or color. There was, indeed, ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 37, November, 1860 • Various
... her. "Say, yer all right!" He turned, swiftly, and ran through the crowd, and in a moment had disappeared like a small drab-coloured ...
— The Island of Faith • Margaret E. Sangster
... first to bound with indignation? Ought you not to have exacted my admittance to the Comedie as a reparation for the insult? For, after all, it is a defeat for you; if I'm considered unworthy, you are struck at the same time as I am. And so I'm a drab, eh? Say at once that I'm a creature to be driven away ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... us down the stairs; The Seraph making only one step at a time, led the way. Far down the drab vista of the back stairs that ended in the scullery, Mary Ellen's red, round face was seen for a moment, like a second rising sun, but vanished as suddenly as it had appeared, at a ...
— Explorers of the Dawn • Mazo de la Roche
... feet. Its leaf is somewhat longer than the laurel, and is a little broader at the point; the edges of the leaf are gently curved, and are of a dark sap green color. The nut is of the form and size of a pigeon's egg, and the kernel completely fills the shell. When fresh it is of a white drab color, but, if long kept, becomes the color of chocolate. The kernel, when new, is nearly all butter, which is extracted in the following manner:—The shell is removed from the kernel, which is also crushed, and then a quantity is put into an earthen pot or pan, ...
— The Commercial Products of the Vegetable Kingdom • P. L. Simmonds
... In the drab velvety dust of these four corners, were gathered, one night of July a generation ago, the children of the village and many of their elders. All the events of that epoch were dated from the evening of this particular day. Another day of note the parish cherished, ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... possession of which I was raised in an instant, from the most abject misery and contempt. My wardrobe consisted of five fashionable coats full mounted, two of which were plain, one of cut velvet, one trimmed with gold, and another with silver lace, two frocks, one of white drab, with large plate buttons, the other of blue with gold binding; one waistcoat of gold brocade; one of blue satin, embroidered with silver; one of green silk, trimmed with figured broad gold lace; one of black silk, with fringes; one of white ...
— The Adventures of Roderick Random • Tobias Smollett
... they passed him. He greeted them amiably as they entered to-day, and exchanged a frigid bow with Monroe. The Senator from Virginia took a chair in the rear of the others, stretched his long legs in front of him, and folded his arms defiantly. He looked not unlike a greyhound, his preference for drab clothing enhancing the general effect of ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... and you go— You remember my lyrics translated—like "sweet bully Bottom"—from Hugo? Though I will say it's curious that simply on just that account there should be Men so bold as to say that not one of my poems was written by me. It would stir the political bile or the physical spleen of a drab or a Tory To hear critics disputing my claim to Empedocles, Maud, and the Laboratory. Yes, it's singular—nay, I can't think of a parallel (ain't it a high lark? As that Countess would say)—there are few men believe ...
— The Heptalogia • Algernon Charles Swinburne
... those free-and-easy transitions not unusual in the "free and enlightened republic." At Smyrna, he signalized his return to the "land of the Franks," (which we had always imagined to be Europe,) by ordering a beefsteak and a bottle of porter, and bespeaking the paper of a Manchester traveller in drab leggings—and we at last find him safe in Constantinople. For all that concerns the city of the Sultan, he contents himself with referring his readers to the volumes of Mr White—and certainly they could not have been left in better ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 59, No. 364, February 1846 • Various
... And so he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs because he wore ...
— Journeys Through Bookland V2 • Charles H. Sylvester
... his many-caped drab overcoat, and fox-skin cap and gloves, sat upon the coachman's box with the proud air of a king upon his throne. And why not? It was Oliver's very first visit to the city, and the suit of clothes he wore ...
— The Missing Bride • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... no special nationality about him from which one could guess how he came by his rather uncommon names. He was reputed to be learned, particularly in the modern languages; had a profusion of long, wild hair of a greenish-drab hue, which matched his complexion exactly,—this prevalent tint being infused also into the cornea or "white" of his eye,—and, in physical proportions, was of weedy and unwholesome growth. He was not a young man of cheerful disposition. On the contrary, his deportment ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume V, Number 29, March, 1860 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... entered a bare white-washed passage, with drab-colored doors in it, leading, as I presumed, into the sleeping chambers ...
— Poor Miss Finch • Wilkie Collins
... of your affection," the bishop returned, "is, if you will permit the observation, somewhat extraordinary. For you propose, I gather, to make of her a camp-follower, a soldier's drab. Come, come, messire! you and I are conversant with warfare as it is. Armies do not conduct encounters by throwing sugar-candy at one another. What home have you, a landless man, to offer Melicent? What place is there for Melicent ...
— Domnei • James Branch Cabell et al
... crimson, and there is much to be said for the combination; for Becket got the benefit of the hair shirt while the people in the street got the benefit of the crimson and gold. It is at least better than the manner of the modern millionaire, who has the black and the drab outwardly for others, and the gold next his heart. But the balance was not always in one man's body as in Becket's; the balance was often distributed over the whole body of Christendom. Because a man prayed and fasted on the Northern snows, ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... we cannot but feel that we are often in contact with a display of spurious passion which is the outcome of the head rather than of the heart. Thus Johnson tells us that Prior's Chloe "was probably sometimes ideal, but the woman with whom he cohabited was a despicable drab of the lowest species." The case of popular and patriotic poetry is very different. It is wholly devoid of affectation. Whatever be its literary merits or demerits, it always represents some genuine and usually deep-rooted conviction. It enables ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... mortality), but I had arrived at near my present growth of six feet, and with my hair in buckle, a handsome lace jabot and wristbands to my shirt, and a red plush waistcoat, barred with gold, looked the gentleman I was born. I wore my drab coat with plate buttons, that was grown too small for me, and quite agreed with Captain Fitzsimons that I must pay a visit to his tailor, in order to procure myself a ...
— Barry Lyndon • William Makepeace Thackeray
... freely confessed that, from an aesthetic point of view, the Englishman, devoid of high lights and shadows, coated with drab, and super-humanly steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... had been painted a dull drab, but the passing of many feet had worn the paint away in places. A stove stood in one corner. Over the sink a tall, round-shouldered woman bent trying to get water from ...
— Sowing Seeds in Danny • Nellie L. McClung
... not look much like Mr. Pulcifer's. Galusha's trunk had arrived at last, but the garments in it were as drab and old-fashioned and "floppy" as those he wore on his arrival. Horatio was invariably arrayed like a lily of the field—if by that term is meant a tiger lily. Raish generally finished his appraisal ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... the plutonics. The formation mostly stands up either in stiff cones or in long spines and ridges, whose perpendicular wall-like crests are impossible to climb. The snowy cliffs rest upon shoulders disposed at the "angle of rest," and the prevailing dull drab-yellow of the base is mottled only where accidental fracture or fall exposes the glittering salt-like interior. The gashes in the flank made by wind and rain disclose the core—grey granite or sandstone coloured by manganese. The greater part ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... these warblers pass north in May, they seem to go singly or in pairs, and their black caps and striped coats show conspicuously. When they return in September they are in troops or loose flocks, are of a uniform dull drab or brindlish color, and are very fat. They scour the treetops for a few days, almost eluding the eye by their quick movements, and ...
— Wake-Robin • John Burroughs
... out-turning and droop of the lower lip; small indeed, and yet pronounced enough to turn what would have been a beautiful face into a merely pretty one. Very despondent and somewhat cross she looked as she leaned back in the armchair, the tangle of bright-coloured silks and of drab holland upon her lap, her hands clasped behind her head, with her snowy forearms and little pink elbows projecting on ...
— The Doings Of Raffles Haw • Arthur Conan Doyle
... Fry in a drab-coloured silk cloak, and plain borderless Quaker cap; a most benevolent countenance,—Guido-Madonna face,—calm, benign. "I must make an inquiry,—Is Maria Edgeworth here? and where?" I went forward; she bade us come and sit beside her. Her first smile as she looked upon ...
— The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, Vol. 2 • Maria Edgeworth
... the approved fashion of the short story in this country. So Harry Anable Kniffin's "The Tribute" weaves in 1,700 words a legend about the Unknown Soldier and makes emotionally vivid the burial of Tommy Atkins. Commonplace types regarded in the past as insufficiently drab, on the one hand, and insufficiently picturesque on the other are reflected in this new romantic treatment. Sarah Addington's "Another Cactus Blooms" prophesies colour in that hard and prickly plant the provincial teacher at Columbia ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... following a funeral. And never, in twenty-two years of respectable tenancy, had the furtive lodger oozed, under darkness, through the Plush front door by night, or a huddle of sidewalk trunks and trappings staged the drab domestic tragedy of ...
— The Vertical City • Fannie Hurst
... sentimental tastes. I will do the fellow the justice to say that he was not a hypocrite. He firmly believed both in himself and his ideas,—especially the former. He pushed both hands through the long wisps of his drab-colored hair, and threw his head back until his wide nostrils resembled a ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 52, February, 1862 • Various
... resembling sheep-bells, which kept up a continual tinkling to the tune of Betty Martin. But still worse. Suspended by blue ribbons to the end of this fantastic machine, there hung, by way of car, an enormous drab beaver hat, with a brim superlatively broad, and a hemispherical crown with a black band and a silver buckle. It is, however, somewhat remarkable that many citizens of Rotterdam swore to having seen the same hat ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 1 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... sought; with regard to none of them was there conviction. They had all arrived either on Wednesday or Thursday. Two couples were still in occupation of their rooms, but neither of these were at home. Late in the afternoon I reduced my list by eliminating a young man in drab, with side whiskers and long cuffs, accompanied by a lady, of thirty or more, of consciously ladylike type. I was disgusted at the sight of them; the other two young people had gone for a long walk, and though I watched their boarding-house until the fiery cloud shone out above, sharing and mingling ...
— In the Days of the Comet • H. G. Wells
... a week without doing that," said Grace, looking about at the scores of olive drab figures. "And in the meantime, they'd think it was very strange we didn't write ...
— The Outdoor Girls in Army Service - Doing Their Bit for the Soldier Boys • Laura Lee Hope
... under a spell At the kindling vision it brings; And for a moment I rejoice, And believe in transcendent things That would mould from this muddy earth A spot for the splendid birth Of everlasting lives, Whereto no night arrives; And this gaunt gray gallery A tabernacle of worth On this drab-aired afternoon, When you can barely see Across its hazed lacune If opposite aught there be Of fleshed humanity Wherewith I may commune; Or if the voice so near Be a soul's ...
— Moments of Vision • Thomas Hardy
... by the necessity of burying himself deeper in his books on Teuton origins and traits. In a brief week the Buchers had forgotten him. All was Herr Deming—the wonderful Herr Deming—the fortunate youth who was bringing the witchery of good luck into the drab home. It was Herr Deming morning, noon ...
— Villa Elsa - A Story of German Family Life • Stuart Henry
... coquette. Her fancy turns from pearl to green, to amber, to pink, to blue and gold and rose, an inexhaustible wardrobe. She blushes, she frowns, she hesitates; she is like a woman in love. She casts abroad her dewy jewels on the leaves, the blades of grass, the tangled laces of the spiders, the drab cold stones. She ruffles the clouds on the face of the sleeping waters; she sweeps through the forests with a low whispering sound, taking a tithe of the resinous perfumes. Always and always she decks herself for the coming of Phoebus, but, woman-like, at first sight of ...
— Half a Rogue • Harold MacGrath
... I pointed, and seeing a man with a gun, gave a startled jump, and pulled up her pony, evidently supposing that we were about to be attacked. "Sha'n't we run?" she began, but then checked herself, as she took in the facts of the drab clothes of the gang and the two armed men in uniform. "They are convicts?" she asked, and when I nodded, she said, "Poor things!" After a pause, she asked, "How long is he in ...
— Master Tales of Mystery, Volume 3 • Collected and Arranged by Francis J. Reynolds
... loveliness of the spring-time found a hiding-place anywhere in the well-ordered chambers of his heart, it never relaxed or softened the straight, inflexible lines of his face. As easily could his collarless drab coat and waistcoat have flushed with a sudden gleam of ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 57, July, 1862 - A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics • Various
... in a stormy nature like his, grief, like love, wears itself out quickly. It burns up passion and sentiment as it does ideas. When at length he regained his calm, everything appeared drab. Thagaste became intolerable. With his impulsive temperament, his changeable humour, he all at once hit upon a plan: To go back to Carthage and open a rhetoric school. Perhaps, too, the woman he loved and had abandoned there was pressing ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... be too late? He had no idea how long it would take to reach Gravesend; he knew nothing of the race track's location. As the train whirled him through Emerson, where his mother lived, he could see the little drab cottage, and wondered pathetically what the good woman would say if she knew her son was going to a race meeting. At twelve he was in ...
— Thoroughbreds • W. A. Fraser
... furniture in the room. At the present time there was nothing to tell the tale but a large nail (from which hung a bunch of seed onions,) and the smoked outline of something which had been nearly fourteen inches long and not far from the same width. In front of this drab outline Jeb Hilson always stood to shave. His memory was so tenacious that I never observed that he noticed the absence of the glass. He gazed steadily at the wall and worked the scissors so deftly that ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... down, puffed it into a glow, and looked around the drab 6 x 8 foot cubicle called the Captain's cabin by ship designers who must have laughed as they laid out the plans. It had about the room of a good-sized coffin. A copy of the Navy Code was lying on the desk. Chase had obviously been reading ...
— A Question of Courage • Jesse Franklin Bone
... the young, strong mower going forth with his mower for to mow spareth the tall and drab hornet's nest and passeth by on the other side, so Time, with his Waterbury hour-glass and his overworked hay-knife over his shoulder, and his long Mormon whiskers, and his high sleek dome of thought with its gray lambrequin of hair around the base of ...
— Nye and Riley's Wit and Humor (Poems and Yarns) • Bill Nye
... scores of polished bayonets, as sturdy figures, clad in olive drab, which matched in hue the brown of the earth, sprang from ...
— Ned, Bob and Jerry on the Firing Line - The Motor Boys Fighting for Uncle Sam • Clarence Young
... us was there any drama, any thrill, any excitement. We stood, a rather lonely little group, in the forest clearing whilst the soldiers in the trench flung us a careless glance, then turned back to their business of the day with an indifference that showed how ordinary and drab a thing custom had ...
— The Dark Forest • Hugh Walpole
... brown, extending on and on to the waving horizon-line. A lonely, hard, heroic country, where flowers and fruit were not, nor birds and brooks, nor green pastures. Whirling strings of dust looped up over fallow ground, the short, dry wheat lay back from the wind, the haze in the distance was drab and smoky, heavy ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey
... of Doors, And made the meanest of your Sons of Whores; The scene of Laughter, and the common chats Of your salt Bitches, and your other Brats; Forc'd to a private Life, to Whore and Drink, On my past Grandeur and my Follies Think: Would I had been the Brat of some mean Drab, Whom Fear or Chance had caus'd to choak or stab, Rather than be the Issue of a King, And by him made so wretched, scorn'd a Thing. How little cause has mankind to be proud Of Noble Birth, the Idol of the Crowd! Have I abroad in Battels Honour ...
— Quaint Gleanings from Ancient Poetry • Edmund Goldsmid
... few paces when he noticed a group of soldiers and horses on the road beyond the garden rail. Their drab uniforms stood out dully against the white of the snow, but their swords and horses' coats tossed back the light. Their bowed cavalry legs moved awkwardly on the snow. Andersen wondered what they were doing there Suddenly the nature of their business flashed ...
— Best Russian Short Stories • Various
... enjoyed leading his people into the promised land, had he not been in the land of Midian. If he had stayed forever in the Court of Pharaoh, with its attendant luxuries, life would have taken on a dull, monotonous hue, and his experience would have seemed drab, wearisome ...
— The Silence • David V. Bush
... word of complaint, and just as cheery as if it were a winter morning on the high veld and we were off to ride down springbok. I knew what the loss of a leg must mean to him, for bodily fitness had always been his pride. The rest of life must have unrolled itself before him very drab and dusty to the grave. But he wrote as if he were on the top of his form and kept commiserating me on the discomforts of my job. The picture of that patient, gentle old fellow, hobbling about his compound and puzzling over his Pilgrim's Progress, ...
— Mr. Standfast • John Buchan
... There was a time for everything, only her times and thoughts would mix themselves up and interfere. Perhaps she was very weak-minded, and the only way for her would be to give it all up, and wear drab, or whatever else might be most unbecoming, and be fiercely severe, mortifying the flesh. She got over that—her young nature reacting—as they all walked up the street together, while the sun shone down smilingly ...
— A Summer in Leslie Goldthwaite's Life. • Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney
... with nicely planted trees and green grass-plats (kept in condition at vast expense to the War Department), stood on the bank of the sluggish river, while just below it and across the stream sprawled the town, drab, flea-bitten, unkempt, littered with tin cans and old bottles, a collection of saloons, gambling-houses and nameless dives, with a few people—a very few—making an honest living by selling groceries, ...
— They of the High Trails • Hamlin Garland
... idea that religion should extend its sway over the subject of Dress. In this they did well; but, in my humble opinion, erred in putting the shears into the hands of sectarianism to cut every man's Dress by exactly the same pattern, and to choose it all from the same grand web of drab. It is sectarianism, and not religion, which would Dress every man alike. That is making Dress the badge of the order. Any thing put on outwardly to tell the world to what sect you belong is an evidence of sectarianism, and not of ...
— Aims and Aids for Girls and Young Women • George Sumner Weaver
... conviction, that things were coming too easy, persisted through his interview with the storekeeper's wife, in the small house behind the store. She was a talkative woman, eager to discuss the one drama in a drab life, and she showed no curiosity as to the reason for ...
— The Breaking Point • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... seventeen and fifteen respectively, in precisely similar costume; a man-servant in pepper and salt, and a little thin timid boy in blue, a sort of confidential page without the buttons. All of them wore drab gaiters and shoes of the thickest conceivable description. From the inside of the coach there issued a delicate elderly lady, who leaned, in a helpless manner, on the arm of a young, plain, but extremely fresh and sweet-looking girl of about sixteen, whom the elder lady called Lucy, and who was so ...
— Freaks on the Fells - Three Months' Rustication • R.M. Ballantyne
... red service flags here and there, here and there a burly figure in olive-drab swaggering along Main Street, nothing except war-bread, the shortage of coal and sugar, and outrageous prices reminded her that the terrific drama was still being played beyond the ocean to the diapason of an orchestra thundering from England ...
— The Crimson Tide • Robert W. Chambers
... the horizon. It lasted about forty minutes altogether, and through it all the little destroyers—don't forget them—were weaving in and out among the big ships; and on the big ships were thousands of troopers, white life-belts around their olive-drab uniforms, standing steadily by life-boats ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... No advertisements of motherhood, or children, or children's things were in the newspapers or magazines. They were forbidden subjects—too dangerously emotional to touch. Laughter and shrill young voices had vanished from the earth to be replaced by the drab grayness of silence and waiting. Death had laid cold hands upon the hearts of mankind and the survivors were ...
— Pandemic • Jesse Franklin Bone
... muttering over their guide-books, when nothing is needed on this spot but the imagination; and that solemn quiet of which the tomb is ever jealous pressed down sadly upon the living. Through the yellow panes at the back of the high altar came a glow suggesting sunshine, baffling the drab of the sky outside; and down in the crypt itself the misty blue ...
— A Splendid Hazard • Harold MacGrath
... one assembling to break their fast, was discolored and dark, whether with age or smoke it would have needed more than a glance to say. The reds had grown brown, and the blues a dirty slate-color, while an impression of drab was prevalent. But the fire was burning as if it had been at it all night and was glorying in having at length routed the darkness; and in the middle of the table on the white cloth, stood a shallow piece ...
— Weighed and Wanting • George MacDonald
... loyal to him. Jack Sheppard has the good-humoured carelessness of that most engaging of all eighteenth century malefactors, Deacon Brodie. It is quite otherwise with Charley Peace. There is little enough gay or debonair about him. Compared with Sheppard, Peace is as drab as the surroundings of mid-Victorian crime are drab compared with the picturesqueness of eighteenth ...
— A Book of Remarkable Criminals • H. B. Irving
... hedgerows, of woods in which birds lilted their spring songs. The atmosphere was fresh and redolent of clean earth; odd shell-holes you came across were, miracle of miracles, grass-grown—a sight for eyes tired with the drab stinking desolation of Flanders. A more than spring warmth quickened growing things. White tendrils of fluff floated strangely in the air, and spread thousands of soft clinging threads over telephone-wires, ...
— Pushed and the Return Push • George Herbert Fosdike Nichols, (AKA Quex)
... when he wore it thus about the business of the day. The plastic modelling of the puckered brow and the mobile mouth is beautifully indicated. The bluish tone left by the razor is just hinted. In his drab coat with its black velvet bands, with his shirt, on which the high lights have been applied, slightly open at the throat, Holbein himself seems to stand before one ...
— Holbein • Beatrice Fortescue
... the above is so pessimistic one might suppose that a ballroom is always a chamber of torture and the young girl taken as an example above, a very drab and distorted caricature of what "a real young girl" should be and is. But remember, the young girl who is a "belle of the ballroom" needs no advice on how to manage a happy situation; no thought spent on how to make a perfect time better. The ballroom is the most wonderful stage-setting ...
— Etiquette • Emily Post
... walks, she and the children had passed within a stone's throw of the little wood-and-iron building. The door was always shut, and the windows hidden by the heavy creeper that covered in the stoep. She had often thought what a drab and dreary life it must be for a woman to live hidden away there, and even the children never passed without a compassionate allusion to "poor Mrs. Saxby, always ...
— Blue Aloes - Stories of South Africa • Cynthia Stockley
... helps"—something that will strengthen men and women to fight down their lower nature, that will convince them that their higher nature is a reality, and that will give them a living sense of companionship in their difficult lives—lives often as drab and depressing as ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... give. He was a creature of a past generation; and whenever in time he had chanced to exist he would always have lagged a generation behind. But there was that one colourful streak which somehow, as if by a mistake in creation, had shot a narrow rainbow vein through his drab soul, like a glittering ...
— The Second Latchkey • Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson
... Seagull amongst them. It was not there; but presently she became conscious of some one standing beside her, and on looking up she recognised Black Gard, the Count's confidential man. He was dressed like the fishermen in drab trousers and a dark blue jersey, but wore a blue cloth cap, with the name of the yacht on it, instead of ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... 'sea dog' beneath such a set of garments. I used to consider my brother Rupert the most especial dandy I had ever seen; but that, evidently, was my limited experience: even Rupert cannot display so perfect a fit in bottle-green coats, so faultless a silken stock, buckskins of such matchless drab!" ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... evening they went to the Gaite to see the performance of "La Grace de Dieu." Quenu, in a frock-coat and drab gloves, with his hair carefully pomatumed and combed, was occupied most of the time in hunting for the names of the performers in the programme. Lisa looked superb in her low dress as she rested her hands in their tight-fitting ...
— The Fat and the Thin • Emile Zola
... Bess, still dusting. She was no longer a drab of the streets but a young lady who, thanks to Dick's check, had paid her premium and was entitled to pull beer-handles with the best. Being neatly dressed in black she did not hesitate to face Mrs. Beeton, and there passed between the two women certain regards that Dick would have appreciated. ...
— The Works of Rudyard Kipling One Volume Edition • Rudyard Kipling
... dragon in the Siward story suggested the further development of the story in the Hrlfssaga. Olrik says: "I n henseende bar Sivard den digres kamp dog noget eget. De almindelige norrne dragekampe lige fra Sigurds drab p Fvne har stadig til ml at vinde dragens guld. For Sivard digre eksisterer dette motiv ikke; han vil frelse de hjemsgte mennesker. Af alle de islandske dragekampe har kun Bjrn Hitdlekmpes noget tilsvarende, og her er det nppe tilfldigt at ogs ...
— The Relation of the Hrolfs Saga Kraka and the Bjarkarimur to Beowulf • Oscar Ludvig Olson
... ribbed, woollen stockings; knee-breeches of some home-made stuff: all the coarser cloth they wore, and they wore little else, was shorn from their own sheep, and spun, woven, and made at home; an old blue dress coat with bright buttons; a drab waistcoat which had once been yellow; and to crown all, a red woollen nightcap, hanging down on one side ...
— Warlock o' Glenwarlock • George MacDonald
... breeze; dropped anchor in the best harbor in these parts! But what's this? colors half-mast?" exclaimed the captain, as he caught sight of a little pouch, woven together of bright colored basket stuff, slung over her shoulder; a little drab paw, darting from out its deepest recesses in pursuit of a tantalizing curl, soon explains how matters stand, and a voice of the greatest feline sweetness is heard in reply to divers catlike salutations, proceeding from ...
— Natalie - A Gem Among the Sea-Weeds • Ferna Vale
... us unless the contrary is strongly suggested. A gloomy day, in a drab room, sparsely tenanted by listeners, invites platform disaster. Everyone feels it in the air. But let the speaker walk squarely up to the issue and suggest by all his feeling, manner and words that this is going to be a great gathering ...
— The Art of Public Speaking • Dale Carnagey (AKA Dale Carnegie) and J. Berg Esenwein
... conceived in this spirit and as mind had affected the colour of the Puritans' clothes, so in turn the drab clothes, prescribed by their new creed, helped to remove colour from the ...
— Woman as Decoration • Emily Burbank
... The prayer concerned that. "Even though I die, I will in some way keep defeat from you," she cried, and so deep was her determination that her whole body shook. Her eyes glowed and she clenched her fists. "If I am dead and see him becoming a meaningless drab figure like myself, I will come back," she declared. "I ask God now to give me that privilege. I demand it. I will pay for it. God may beat me with his fists. I will take any blow that may befall if but this my boy ...
— Winesburg, Ohio • Sherwood Anderson
... belief that her grandfather was a cunning device in wax. The chests were taken out with all convenient despatch, and taken in to be unlocked by Mrs Jarley, who, attended by George and another man in velveteen shorts and a drab hat ornamented with turnpike tickets, were waiting to dispose their contents (consisting of red festoons and other ornamental devices in upholstery work) to the best advantage in the ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... this was the end. She was to be thrust out of the new brightness, back into the drab dreariness, the emptiness that was her fate. She lifted ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... who did not understand it. It is more interesting than according to rules: amiable, though not faultless. The ethical delineations of 'that noble and liberal casuist' (as Shakespeare has been well called) do not exhibit the drab-coloured quakerism of morality. His plays are not copied either from The Whole Duty of Man, or from The Academy of Compliments! We confess, we are a little shocked at the want of refinement in those who are shocked at the want of refinement in Hamlet. The want of punctilious ...
— Characters of Shakespeare's Plays • William Hazlitt
... April, 191-, Clement J. Cleggett walked sedately into the news room of the New York Enterprise with a drab-colored walking-stick in his hand. He stood the cane in a corner, changed his sober street coat for a more sober office jacket, adjusted a green eyeshade below his primly brushed grayish hair, unostentatiously sat down at the copy desk, and ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... Sandy Rowl came to the crest of Black Cliff, a drizzle of rain was falling in advance of the fog. The wind was clipping past in soggy gusts that rose at intervals to the screaming pitch of a squall. A drab mist had crept around Point-o'-Bay and was spreading over the ice in Scalawag Run. Presently it would lie thick between Scalawag Island and ...
— Harbor Tales Down North - With an Appreciation by Wilfred T. Grenfell, M.D. • Norman Duncan
... glad to see us here—I can guess that much," thought Hank. "But I wish I could guess how Anson Dalton comes to be here. I didn't see anything of his drab boat ...
— The Motor Boat Club and The Wireless - The Dot, Dash and Dare Cruise • H. Irving Hancock
... shiny. The glint or flash of a hunting bow will frighten game. I have often seen rabbits or deer stand until the bow goes off, then jump in time to escape the arrow. At first we believed they saw the arrow; later we found that they saw the flash. Bows really should be painted a dull green or drab color. But we love to see the natural grain ...
— Hunting with the Bow and Arrow • Saxton Pope
... Austria ended. And not youth only, nor Italians only. The British troops loudly and healthily and almost riotously sang also, all the temporary soldiers and nearly all the regulars. Yet here and there were gloom, and drab, wet blankets, trying to make smoulder those raging fires of joy. In a few officers' Messes, especially among the more exalted units, men of forty years and more croaked like ravens over their impending loss of pay and rank, Brigadier Generals who would soon be Colonels again, and ...
— With British Guns in Italy - A Tribute to Italian Achievement • Hugh Dalton
... his fellow roomers. A strange, drab lot he thought them from the occasional glimpses he had had in passings upon the dark stairway and in the gloomy halls. They appeared to be quiet, inoffensive sort of folk, occupied entirely with their own affairs. He had ...
— The Efficiency Expert • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... that he was received by Washington, and, "after ... half an hour, the General came in again, with his hair neatly powdered, a clean shirt on, a new plain drab coat, white waistcoat and white silk stockings. At three, dinner was on the table, and we were shown by the General into another room, where everything was set off with a peculiar taste and at the ...
— The True George Washington [10th Ed.] • Paul Leicester Ford
... of activity; but two or three untidy loungers leaned against a rude shack with "Pool Room" painted on its dirty windows. All round, the rolling prairie stretched back to the horizon, washed in dingy drab and gray. The ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... tall man's height, or more; No bonnet screen'd her from the heat; A long drab-coloured cloak she wore, A mantle reaching to her feet: What other dress she had I could not know; Only she wore a cap that was as white ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... when mounting it you should make the best color record you are able. This is true to some extent at least of all coverings of fur, feathers, or scales, and the stronger the light the more damage. I have seen a mounted mink placed in direct sunshine, bleached to a drab and the yellow feathers on a 'flicker faded ...
— Home Taxidermy for Pleasure and Profit • Albert B. Farnham
... funereal woodlands of these coasts, Draped like a perpetual hearse, And memories of an old war's ancient losses, Dwell in their faces' shadows like gray ghosts. And worse— The terror of the black man always near— The drab level of the ricefields and the marsh Lends them ...
— Carolina Chansons - Legends of the Low Country • DuBose Heyward and Hervey Allen
... said, actually make the shallow waters of the lake look pink. Fortunately they had not been hunted for their plumage and were not timid. After two days of familiarity with the boat they were willing to let me approach within twenty yards before finally taking wing. The coloring, in this land of drab grays and browns, was a delight to the eye. The head is white, the beak black, the neck white shading into salmon-pink; the body pinkish white on the back, the breast white, and the tail salmon-pink. The wings ...
— Inca Land - Explorations in the Highlands of Peru • Hiram Bingham
... with cold and fatigue, to peer with sleepy eyes, no longer down the familiar avenue of ice and pine-trees, but across a white and dreary wilderness of snow. On the far horizon, dividing earth and sky, a thin drab streak is seen which soon merges, in the clear sunrise, into the faint semblance of a city. Golden domes and tapering fire-towers are soon distinguishable, and our driver grows proportionately loquacious as his home is ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... black and yellow of Imperial Germany, everywhere the black eagles spread their wings. Even without these indications, the large vigorous neatness of everything would have marked it German. Vast multitudes of men went to and fro, many in white and drab fatigue uniforms busy about the balloons, others drilling in sensible drab. Here and there a full uniform glittered. The airships chiefly engaged his attention, and he knew at once it was three of these he had seen on the previous night, taking advantage of the cloud welkin ...
— The War in the Air • Herbert George Wells
... of the second floor corridor that I struck the first of my desultory supply of matches, and by its light discovered a placard nailed to the wall. The thing was yellow with age and hardly legible. In the drab light of the match I had difficulty in reading it—but, as far as I can remember, the ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science February 1930 • Various
... of a shallow sea Carimata raises a lofty barrenness of grey and yellow tints, the drab eminence of its arid heights. Separated by a narrow strip of water, Suroeton, to the west, shows a curved and ridged outline resembling the backbone of a stooping giant. And to the eastward a troop of insignificant islets stand ...
— The Rescue • Joseph Conrad
... why, if the crimson velvet of the rose was made by God, all colors except black and white are sinful for her; and the modest Quaker, after hanging all her house and dressing all her children in drab, cannot but marvel at the sudden outstreaking of blue and yellow and crimson in the tulip-beds under her window, and reflect how very differently the great All-Father arrays the world's housekeeping. The consequence of all this has ...
— Household Papers and Stories • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... one, who had just dismounted from his bay polo-pony, was Mortimer, of the Intelligence—tall, straight, and hawk-faced, with khaki tunic and riding-breeches, drab putties, a scarlet cummerbund, and a skin tanned to the red of a Scotch fir by sun and wind, and mottled by the mosquito and the sand-fly. The other—small, quick, mercurial, with blue-black, curling beard and hair, a fly-switch for ever flicking in his left hand—was Scott, ...
— The Green Flag • Arthur Conan Doyle
... dragons, was Margarita, a lovely smile curving her lips and the warm light in her deep slate-coloured eyes burning down, down into my very vitals. In that one rich, welcome smile all my calm English months melted like wax in a furnace, and Oxford was a drab dream and Surrey a stupid sick-bay! As I faced her, the old wound burst and widened, with that torturing sweet shock that I had relegated sagely to poets and youthful heats, and I knew that I loved her hopelessly, with a love that ...
— Margarita's Soul - The Romantic Recollections of a Man of Fifty • Ingraham Lovell
... Barton the Reverend Cecil had strayed into Betty's room, now no longer boudoir and bedchamber, but just a room, swept, dusted, tidy, with the horrible tidiness of a room that is not used. There were squares of bright yellow on the dull drab of the wall-paper, marking the old hanging places of the photographs and pictures that Betty had taken to Paris. He opened the cupboard door: one or two faded skirts, a flattened garden hat and a pair of Betty's old shoes. He shut ...
— The Incomplete Amorist • E. Nesbit
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